.THE 



Ideal Life 



BY 
ELLA F. MOSBY. 



CINCINNATI, O. : 
PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR. 

-1S77.- 



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.e 



48 65 5 5 

AUG 1 3 1942 



Press of Wrightson & Co. 






dedicated 



TO MY LITTLE NAMESAKE 



ELLA MOSBY SMITH 



A brow with sunny hair : 

Looks, such as child-angels wear 

When they judge you through and through 

With a brave and sweet regard ; 

Lips, that kisses might award 

If your soul did shine out true. 



CONTENTS. 

PART I.-TIIE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 
Chap. Pago. 

I. Unconscious Growth 7 

II. "After his Kind" 21 

III. The Human Body 35 

IV. The New Inheritance 49 

PART II.— IDEALS AND MYTHS OF THE RACES. 

I. True History. 57 

II. The Hebraic Spirit of Pilgrimage 75 

III. The Greek Ideal, or the Feast 85 

IV. The Germanic Spirit of Conflict 101 

V. Ideal Forms of Government 121 

PART III.— THE ARTISTIC LIFE. 

I. The Uses of Art ICO 

II. The Materials of Art— I. Landscape 155 

III. The Materials of Art— II. Folk-lore 16G 

IV. Suggestions of Architecture 180 

V. Sculpture 397 

VI. Pictures, and the Painter 21U 

VII. The Music of Life 226 

V11I. Poetry 237 



Ideal Life 



PART I.— CHAPTER I. 

INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 

#T is Spring, and the whole world is green ; 
& green overhead, where the wind and the 
tree-tops talk together as it "bloweth zvhejr it 
UstetJi ;" green lower down where the nests hang 
between floating lights and shadows in the leafy- 
boughs, and unseen winged things twitter and 
stir in the verdant silence; green under foot 
where the lush meadow grasses grow thick by 
every pool and limpid stream. The Spring is 
abroad ; in the air, which is resonant and vibrant 
with all clear, sweet sounds ; in the orchards, 
where the fruit-trees stand by night with a white 
spray and mist of blossoms in the silvery moon- 
shine ; and, in the long pastures, green and 
fresh and sweet, where the herds of cattle 
wander at their will. 



8 J DEAL LIFE. 

This is a thought from the divine mind, 
wrought out through cheery hail, flakey snow- 
storms and beating rains, even as the full, rich 
harvest-tide will be brought forth out of the hot 
silent noons and swift nights of summer. The 
divine artist does not weary, nor grow impatient 
because this exquisite picture needs long pro- 
cesses of heat and moisture ; though the seed 
must sleep, the pale buds awaken slowly and 
the petals fall again to dust before the final 
ripening. 

Every human life is also a divine thought. I 
think it lives forever in the divine mind, lovely, 
whole, full of the blood of life, and is the vital 
soul of that restless, marred and half obliterated 
image which we see in these troubled waters. 
He seeks always to give us its full realization, 
its lost symmetry and serenity. With infinite 
peace it is done, for He builds for our long im- 
mortality, and sees with divine insight in every 
life, however crippled, or poor, or weak, some- 
what of the infinite and eternal which survives. 

So day after day comes the new beginning ; 
so night after night, the rest. I believe there 
are beautiful meanings in the pause of the dark- 
ness, as well as in the active work of the light. 
In the day we often forget what manner of men 
we might be. Only in the quiet shadows do we 
dare look into the face of our ideal life, and see 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. C; 

its loveliness. For then we have laid aside, if 
but for a little while, our resistance, our world- 
liness, our self-consciousness. As the parable 
says of the higher kingdom, it is "as if a man 
should cast seed into the ground, and should 
sleep, and the seed should spring and grow up, 
lie knoweth not how." So unconscious is the 
soul's growth ; through the long winter nights 
when the snow falls soft and noiseless on the 
roof, and we remember those we love with tears 
that do not hurt as they flow; in the short nights 
of Summer, when the windows are all open to 
the moon, and sometimes a bird sings out, loud 
and clear, from the orchard trees, or the bells 
of the cattle ring down by the meadow brook. 
Ringing and singing into the very heart of slum- 
ber and dreams ; the song and the bell sound on, 
so sweet, so distinct, and yet so far away, and a 
vision of g^een summer lands, a vision of peace, 
seems to arise and float before our sleeping eyes, 
and does not quite fade when we awaken. 

The colors of memory, as McDonald says, 
shine out clearest and fairest m the dark. In 
our sleep we grow back into our childhood, and 
doubtless it is so that humanity keeps alive in 
its innermost heart the eternal child. It is not 
yesterday or to-day that we remember in our 
dreams; it is the foolish trouble of our early 
years, and their innocent and small delights. 



10 IDEAL LIFE. 

When the eyes of the man, old and tired, close 
at night, he sees the yellow harvest fields and 
the pastures where the sheep were feeding on 
their knees, the gabled roof of the old home, 
and the shy, brown bird, and her brood, which 
the boy watched. He hears her tiny piping 
and the nestlings chirp, and the children laugh 
out again in the narrow lane. So the old years 
are woven through our present hours in one 
seamless and imperishable fabric. For ' ' the 
divine providence of the Lord is in all and single 
things, yea, in the very least of all, and regards 
that which is eternal." 

It is only our own littleness, our own limita- 
tions, which dwarf our earth and lower our 
horizon. The great patience of God brings 
forth one blade of grass after another, one 
thought of truth after another for the certain 
harvest-time. All things minister to the new 
creation and birth. There is nothing more won- 
derful to me than the divine patience in its slow 
and silent use of these ministries. It is so 
strongly contrasted with our burden of unrest, 
our solicitude and burning impatience, our un- 
fruitful haste, or our listless and cold waiting. 
The author, whom I have before quoted, beau- 
tifully says of the divine providence, that in its 
still and stately following it is like a stream, by 
which whoso trusts himself and his life unto its 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. I I 

current, is " bourne on to continual felicities, 
whatever may be the appearance of the means. " 
Only this faith, fully absorbed with one's love, can 
give that serene atmosphere of peace in which 
the ideal, or heavenly life can be attained, for 
we are most often led by experiences which 
appear untoward or opposed, by long delays, 
suspense and disappointments. These are re- 
peated, more or less, in each day's round, and 
they seem to make our life bare, ugly and im- 
perfect, but they are, in truth, the greatest aids 
to sure and well-balanced spiritual growth. Our 
interruptions are sometimes the truer work, be- 
cause they have less of self-will and vanity than 
our own plans. 

Could we be brought into an ideal household, 
that is, an angelic one, and see there with close 
look, its daily and familiar work and amuse- 
ments — you remember St. Bernard, of Clung, 
says : — 

" For there they live in such delight, 
Such pleasures and such play, 
That unto them a thousand years 
Does seem as yesterday!" 

Could we witness their common moods of 
thought and feeling, I think the first trait which 
would strike us as most unlike an earthly home, 
would be their peace, which is, after all, but a 



12 IDEAL LIFE. 

glorified patience. When the angels teach an 
ignorant and blinded mind, they are not im- 
patient with its blunders, for their insight per- 
ceives the winged soul, beautiful even in the 
sleep of the chrysalis, and they give it the 
warmth and light of loving truth, without which 
it cannot awaken. If they themselves do not 
fully comprehend one of those truths, " which 
they desire to look into," they see before them a 
joyous and unfolding eternity, and are best 
pleased to await God's time of revelation. 

When they watch even beside the death-bed 
of the evil, they are in no haste to go on to a 
higher work of love. They do not ask of what 
use is this, if he should not enter heaven at 
last. They keep all silently some thought of 
eternal life in the weak and darkening mind, 
and look tenderly upon the wasted face until 
the white peace of their faces is reflected even 
there. This comfort, this rest, seems to them, 
and to the dear Lord who sends them, enough 
for all their desires and efforts so long as they 
are needed. When the soul afterwards awakens 
into his own conscious and deformed life, he will 
leave them, they will not leave him. And with 
the sorrowful and innocent who die, oh, how 
tender is their vigil. We scarcely realize, we 
who see so much of the bodily pain before, what 
dying may become. A pathetic writer of our 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 13 

day, tells us of a poor, neglected, maltreated 
boy, and his peaceful end among friends who at 
last found him. "Now, he murmured, I am 
happy ! He fell into a light slumber, and waking, 
smiled as before ; then spoke of beautiful gar- 
dens, which he said stretched out before him, 
and were filled with figures of men, women and 
many children, all with light upon their faces, 
then whispered that it was Eden — and so died." 

But if this last work of all is done so lovingly, 
how gently, and with what infinite care, are the 
beginnings of life dealt with ? No harsh thought 
jars upon the little children in such a home, no 
untender word, no troubled look. The tinted 
scroll-like flower buds do not unfold themselves 
more freely to the sun of May than these inno- 
cent souls to the light of love. 

There are such homes in heaven, there might 
be such homes on earth if we would. In this 
life, if any, we must find our rest, and that un- 
conscious and spontaneous growth which is true 
vitality. Do we understand after all what it 
means to say "our life." Not the day's routine 
that comes and goes, not something that is shuf- 
fled off at last, but that which lives in us, and 
abides always. In that there must be rest to- 
day, or you will not find it hereafter, for your 
life is yourself, you cannot exorcise it, or put it 
down, you cannot disintegrate yourself from its 



14 IDEAL LIFE. 

elements. Yet it needs but patience to grow 
into the heavenly image, for the heavens wait 
longingly upon man to give him of their light 
and love and bloom as he will receive. Open your 
soul earnestly and with desire, put aside the ob- 
stacles of the false, and the evil ; and against all 
inborn antagonisms you will change and grow, 
not of yourself, but of God. Only be not too has- 
tily discouraged, or drawn aside. Michael Angelo 
L once said that genius was eternal patience, for 
< he saw how freely it was given to every soul that 
unswervingly waited and worked. But there is yet 
more. For truth is eternal patience with diffi- 
culties and mistakes and blindness ; love is (with 
each other) eternal patience in bearing the in- 
constancies and weakness of human hearts. 
Patience and passion (in its truest sense,) spring 
from the same root, and indeed the same prin- 
ciple of force and fire is in both applied diversely 
in action or in endurance. Above all is God 
eternal patience with our failures and murmurs. 
I could almost say that to learn this is to learn 
the chief lesson in life; certainly without it you 
learn nothing. 

By its aid you will at last know that no life is 
incapable of ideal form ; and that a failure in act 
is not irreparable, if the desire for the brightest 
and best survives, and keeps unbroken the image 
of the manhood, within. The whole upheaval 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. I 5 

and up-breathing of the world comes from in- 
dividual desires and efforts. It is like the scene 
between Mephistopheles and Valentine in Gou- 
nod's Faust, our deeds may shiver to pieces like 
the sword before the enemy's power, but even 
though despairingly we lift up the cross-shaped 
hill of aspiration before him, he pauses, trembles 
and succumbs. For it is the love, rather than 
the act ; the spirit, not the word, which conquers 
all things. 

There are two ideals in the heart of every man 
who strives for a better life, the heavenly home, 
the possible angel, and toward these his long- 
ing shapes all outer event and circumstance. 
These two thoughts of the "new earth," the 
higher man, are the inspirations of humanity, 
and . stir in all revolutions, emancipations and 
social reforms. They are the mediums of the 
new birth of the individual and the race, and 
make of all earnest labor everywhere, of the 
brain or body, of the heart or tongue, one sym- 
metrical and living form. Its growth has been 
surely, though by slow degrees, through all re- 
corded ages, creeping on from point to point 
against mistakes and treacheries, but steadily 
casting aside as refuse all work that has not this 
living end, the regeneration of the world, hu- 
man and inanimate. You see a vast army of 
workers abroad, digging the Suez canal, sinking 



l6 IDEAL LIFE. 

artesian wells, draining foul marshes, cultivat- 
ing waste places, exploring strange lands, pour- 
ing forth life as water to touch these ends, You 
see them in the cities and inhabited countries, 
enunciating hard truths, toiling over dark prob- 
lems, saving little children from the mire, hold- 
ing out hands of help to the fallen men and 
women, comforting the sick and destitute, mak- 
ing the bond free, telling of Christ the One Di- 
vine Man, to those who know Him not. It is the 
heart beating, and the lungs breathing through 
one body, and the life is one and from heaven. 
The living picture of the home you would so 
]ov<t ? comes without doubt from the angelic 
households. And your human ideal, that in- 
visible counselor and judge of the earnest soul, 
is the form which the grand Humanity of the 
heavens impresses on all human thought and 
love. For you must see Truth incarnated before 
you follow it, you will not desire to reform un- 
til you behold living features, aglow with strong 
and generous thoughts, a human face, kindled 
with all pure and lovely impulses. You can- 
not go out from such a presence, and straight- 
way do an ignoble or cruel act. It holds you 
with invisible bonds. Nor will the cheerless 
and disorderly dwelling be changed unless one 
sees in his mind the bright fire on the well-swept 
hearth, the dewy garden fragrant with flowers, 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH, 17 

which a pure and strong human life brings 
around it. For the spiritual life in you seems 
always to realize things on the outer and visible 
side. When there is no such effort, existence 
is like a glove from which the living hand has 
been withdrawn, limp, helpless, and empty, a 
mere form and covering of vacuity. 

A thing rejected, 
Which life thrusts by, all imperfected. 

How easily we recognize those in whom the 
spiritual life is a moving force! We find a 
stimulus, a moral strength in their companion- 
ship, a light and warmth in their atmosphere. 
We all know the sense of quiet friendliness 
which we draw unconsciously from the sight of 
a bright fire. It seems to rest one to come 
within its charmed circle, the low murmuring 
of the flames hushes our cares, a thousand cheer- 
ful fancies kindle in its glow. What sunshine is 
to a landscape, what the fire is to a chamber, 
attracting, instinctively, the first look, the first 
smile from all w r ho enter, so is a life, lighted 
from within, to its own neighborhood. Almost 
without knowing it, we utter our best thoughts 
to such a friend, we tell him our dreams of what 
we would feign achieve, not for ourselves, but 
others. We feel strong beside him, his life 
incites us to unselfish deeds, to sincere words, 



I 8 IDEAL LIFE. 

to warm feelings. He is the living and personal 
form of a spiritual force acting upon us. 

One, who is so thoroughly "to heaven accli- 
mated," whose soul lives in that unseen world, 
does not quickly grow old and tired, as men do 
so early in our feverish and over-tasked life. 
For we are economists with our soil, our fuel, 
our metals, our stones, — we call them precious, 
— but we waste fearfully the one wonderful and 
irrevocable motive force — life. We fritter it 
away, we wear it out, we break its vitality, we 
weary of it, we desperately or causelessly thrust 
it off, this one unknown and priceless possession 
whereby we attain the celestial eternity. We 
use it so recklessly that we are old in the years 
of our prime ; and this spiritual youth, which 
only the higher life ensures, is one of the rarest 
and strongest graces of our age. But sympathy 
with all things good and pure, loyalty to the 
heavenly kingdom does keep fresh the bloom 
of the heart. There is a breeziness, a "sea- 
tingle," a flavor about the thoughts of such a 
one, which more intellectual minds may wholly 
lack. It is the old story of the clod and its 
fragrance sometimes, for this grace may exist 
apart from culture and talent. 

"One day 
A wanderer found a lump of clay ; 
So redolent of rare perfume, 
Its odor sweetened all the room. 



UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 1 9 

' What art thou ?' was his quick demand. 
'Art thou some gum from Samarcand, 

Or Spikenard in this rude disguise, 

Or other costly merchandise.' 

' Nay ; if my secret I disclose, 
I have been dwelling near the Rose'." 

This is the power that lies within the true 
communion of saints. The rose of eternal 
and spiritual beauty — the bloom of ideal good — 
sheds such fragrance that even those who come 
into outer association and contact gain some- 
thing of its ineffable aroma. All the world are 
heirs of heroic and true souls. 

"Who rowing hard against the stream, 
See distant gates of Eden gleam, 
And did not dream it was a dream." 

The open vision and realization are indeed 
only won so, — by combats and temptations, — 
by " rowing hard against the stream." Many 
things must be given up, — ambitions, vanities, 
forms of self-will and pride, — when renunciation 
is like the tearing of the beating heart from the 
still living and suffering body. Many things 
also are to be deferred in this incomplete earthly 
life, — many special opportunities,, outside ad- 
vantages, — for sometimes the victor must run 
without weights to touch the goal. And so we 
often work on with eyes so blinded by tears, 



20 IDEAL LIFE. 

with such weary hands, such discouraged, 
doubting hearts, that we do not see the great 
design unfolding itself in and through us. 

But the outlines grow, the colors deepen. It 
is as M. Saintine said of music: "if you look 
outwardly you will be troubled by the grating 
sounds with which they make accord, the con- 
tracted faces of the musicians, the whimsical 
and ungraceful forms of the instruments; you 
must listen with your soul to feel the full and 
gracious harmonies that flow from this same 
orchestra." So put away your personal loss and 
disappointment, and make the great longing for 
unity, coincident impulses, quickening tides of 
sympathy in this world of humanity ; and against 
all cowardice and denial, you will cry, as G«|liieo 
cried of the rolling earth : 

' ' E pur si muove /' ' ' 'And still it moves. ' ' 



AFTER HIS KIND. 21 

• 



CHAPTER II 



AFTER HIS KIND. 



■eXIT E ' belong to one body of humanity. The 
«*3-* same spiritual life-blood courses through 
every vein, and the same nervous strength 
tingles in the branching fibres. But every man 
recognizes in himself a separate individuality, a 
subtle sense of identity rounding the sphere 
which sets him apart from his brethren. The 
rythmeric systole and diastole do not rise and 
fall alike in any two hearts. We see the strong- 
est manifestation of this separating force in the 
faculty which wc call genius. 

A certain family for generation after genera- 
tion may lead quiet and unnoticed lives, — buy- 
ing, selling, working, marrying and giving in 
marriage, after the common way of their neigh- 
bors, — ruled by the superstitions and faiths of 
their time, dying at last without visible impress 
on their race. But all at once the type changes. 
One of their blood arises, who does not feel 



22 IDEAL LIFE. 

with them nor think their thoughts, — to whom 
life means more and differently, — who hears "a 
voice speaking," and sees a vision, who talks in 
strange phrases of virtues, and truths, and 
powers. At first, his country-people, his neigh- 
bors, his kinsmen, do not understand, or worse 
still, ////^understand him ; he is regarded by all 
with doubt, by many with dislike and derision. 
In after years mankind will acknowledge him as 
a Dante, an Ang'elo, a Beethoven, or on a 
higher and more spiritual plane, a Paul, a Sa- 
vonarola, a Luther, but many valleys of isolation 
and shadow must be passed through first. 

It is thus our poets, our teachers, our pro- 
phets arise from the masses around them, and 
with vast leaps of thought bridge over the chasm 
that lies between the dreams of their own age 
and the attainments of the next. And the 
spiritual loveliness that is shown forth in them, 
shines on, and rules the minds of succeeding 
generations, as the moon sways the turbulent 
sea-tides below her. He, who gives to his race 
a new thought of truth, a new ideal of virtue, 
moves the world so far forward on the road that 
winds higher and nearer heaven. 

These larger orbits of light are traced visibly 
before us, but could we read unwritten history, 
we would find each one of the common multi- 
tude as far apart from his fellows ; as I have 



AFTER HIS KIND. 23 

said, individual in love, influence and life. — 
Though we are indeed but fractional parts of 
the integral age now, we are as truly separate 
integers in which long lines of ancestry culmi- 
nate. We cannot excuse ourselves from exertion 
by saying that we have no power, for the power 
of all these is in us. We may not urge that 
our age is not heroic, and therefore we cannot 
be so, for it is the heroic part to strive against 
an unheroic age. It is ours to see that we make 
it one whit fairer, not to reproach or accuse it 
with hands idly folded before us. There is need 
for us to show to this busy, jostling world why 
we are here at all, to prove ourselves called. 
The phraseology which the old Calvinists de- 
lighted in, of the " calling and election " to be 
made sure, means this, if it mean anything good 
or true ; for we are all called to form the new 
heavens and earth, towards which the creation 
groans and strains. And in the great temple 
of humanity, no stone, where such is significant, 
can be thrown aside, or hewn and chiseled after 
another's likeness. 

There is possible symmetry for all when joined 
together in their right places. When it is done — 
that is heaven ; our part is only the preparation 
of our stones, — the ''joining together," — the 
"right places," are the work of the Master 
builder. 



24 IDEAL LIFE. 

Our life is often so false, so unshapely, that 
we have to go back to the beginning- to see the 
elements of good at all. When we reach the 
harder adult years, it is by faith only, we aver 
that the folded wings of love, the sleeping 
infancy, are there. But what, after all, is genius 
or greatness of soul, if it be not a return to 
childlike simplicity and directness, to the child- 
like freshness of vision ? This is marked in all 
our truly great men ; it is only the keeping their 
individuality, as children must, but as grown 
people rarely do. I do not think we do justice 
to the profound perceptions of childhood, for 
we forget our own, and others are unexpressed. 
I remember once having two play-mates. One 
I loved ardently, and our time passed in perfect 
harmony and pleasure, but with the other I had 
misunderstandings and little troubles as all chil- 
dren have, and I do not think I was ever very 
fond of her. But I parted from the first with 
perfect content, while the going of the other 
was greeted with passionate grief and bitter 
tears. It was the perfect satisfaction I had felt 
in the one case that comforted me ; it was to me 
an unmarred enjoyment laid aside to be taken 
up again, and certainly my own ; but the other 
had all the sting of an unfinished, incomplete 
and spoiled possession. It never would be any- 
thing but a pleasure that might have been so 



AFT£R HIS KIND. 2$ 

much greater; and I cried, not for the loss of 
the personal presence, which I do not think I 
regretted, but the pang of incompleteness. I 
have often felt the same since with a dimmer 
apprehension. Love holds its own, to its breast, 
surely, closely, without loss. But the things we 
do not love, the things that are always jarring 
because the melody is never quite touched, are 
those that hurt us. It is our incompetence, our 
disloyalty, that pierces so deep, and with such 
sharp thrusts into the soul. 

Such swift, flashing conceptions as we find in 
these childish experiences, flying straight to the 
centre of the thing aimed at, are, as we shall 
hereafter see, those of poetry and the arts. But 
believe that somewhat of this same nature lives, 
though unseen, in every one; even as no fea- 
tures are so uncouth or base that they do not 
sometimes wear to the mother's sight, — that 
earthly vision most akin to the divine, — the 
child-look of her nursling. That exquisite truth 
was touched when Christ, surrounded by his 
followers, chose a little child, and with the sig- 
nificant action of the east, ' ' set him in the midst 
of them." "In the midst," mark that, for it 
means much ; the midst or center always relat- 
ing to the purest vitality and clearest light. 

The universal application of this is illustrated 
by the inanimate world, for in every material — 

3 



26 IDEAL LIFE. 

iron, bronze, wood or stone — there sleeps, as the 
artist well knows, some beautiful form, or 
thought of art, which may be wrought out after 
its kind. But only "after its kind." The ideal 
forms of stone are not coincident with those of 
the softer and more flexible wood, nor does the 
bronze, whose rich coloring still seems to settle 
and glow with golden fervors of heat, contain 
the same ideal forms of the colder iron. So 
there is but one man — or one woman — who 
could or should live out your ideal — you your- 
self. To believe and accept this, saves us from 
many disappointments, mistakes and failures. 
Each soul has his own "life-kingdom ;" let him 
conquer and rule therein, but let his neighbor's 
boundaries be held sacred. A riddle is given to 
each mind to solve for itself, and the ' ' familiar 
spirit" whispers in each heart in its dark hours. 
But concern yourself not with other men's con- 
flicts over- much ; exorcise your own evil, and 
then the meagre form of duty will be changed 
into the radiant presence of love, and you can 
aid them. 

Yet it is not strange that we lose sight of 
our individuality at times, when we move in 
such a world ol shadows and masques. Even 
our bodies are borrowed. Who knows how 
many before us have used this same lime, phos- 
phorous, nitrogen, and these essential earthly 



AFTJER HIS KIND. 2J 

salts ? In our traits, habits and even tricks of 
gesture, old ancestries survive ; the manners with 
which we conceal our moods are old clothes 
worn by many others. The words with which 
we woo, and fondle our babes, nay, which die 
on our dying lips are not our own. Even our 
sins are imitative ; you remember what George 
Eliot says of the ''insipid misdoing" of servile 
characters, who do not originate a fault. Know- 
ing all these things, it is wonderful that we do 
not wholly lose the sense of reality. But now 
and then comes a moment of vision, and as the 
old stories say, we are "aware of a presence." 
It may be only the sensitive quiver of thought 
which lights up a well-known face, a footstep that 
pauses silently and lovingly beside you, a tender 
and pleading touch from trembling fingers, but it 
is enough. The dear soul you love reveals itself 
in its own likeness, or perhaps the voice to which 
you are listening, half inattentive, suddenly 
breaks into low, soft adagio tones, — it is as if a 
hand had thrust itself into the dark of your soul 
and felt for the hidden keys, — and lo, all the 
sweet harmonies flowed forth! Strangely obe- 
dient now, you will follow whither the impulse 
leads you, for you know the voice, it is that of 
the true king. 

"Not Lancelot's, no, another's." 



28 IDEAL LIFE. 

This indefinable sphere of man's individual 
life seems, when once recognized, to haunt all 
inhabited places. Have you not noticed how 
something of a human presence lingers around 
all houses that have been also homes ? The 
door never quite loses the sense of entrance to 
you ; and in the silence the conscious floor hears 
and strains with echoes and faint footfalls that 
are gone. You fancy sometimes, after your 
friends leave you, that you still hear them 
opening the wicket gate, and coming down the 
long graveled walk, as perhaps they often do in 
imagination, or remembrance. It is a pleasant 
thought after all to haunt a place with love, as 
the white rose of summer fills the place of its 
blooming with its disembodied spirit of fragrance. 

I once had a negro nurse, who, like all of her 
sable race, was very fond of hymns. I can 
almost imagine now the dusky outlines of the 
figure, sitting over the dying coals and embers 
in the twilight, and singing low to herself of — 

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 
Where our possessions lie." 

Until the dark around her seemed to glimmer 
with their verdure and flowers. And thinking 
of "our possessions" which shall remain our 
own, this same line, "the phantom of a silent 
song," sings itself again in my mind. I trust 



AFTER HIS KIND. 2g 



that the sweet fields of our father's country will 
not be utterly strange, for I dare to believe that 
our landscapes and dwellings and even types of 
face will be rather transfigured and glorified 
than wholly destroyed. All these weave them- 
selves into our separate individuality which is a 
divine gift. Fidelity to one's country, love of 
kindred, the tender remembrance of beloved 
things and scenes, are the broken lights from an 
infinite love shining on our troubled lives, and 
shall not be extinguished but exalted hereafter. 
Could the Egyptian forget the swelling of his 
sacred river, or the still unfolding of the lotus 
flower, leaf after leaf? These have been to him 
perhaps symbols of the highest power, and the 
most perfect tranquillity he has known, and in- 
struct him of better things. The eternal world, 
which is given for ever, is full of such imagery, 
of the lifting up of floods, of the rejoicing of 
green trees, of the lily's royal blossom. 

I doubt whether we ever lose anything that 
was truly our own, of our life. The tender 
grace of a day that is dead, returns in the next 
Spring-time. Does not the earth look lifeless, 
the woods all bare,, dry, skeleton-like, the ground 
brown and hard? But lock out again, hear the 
rustle of the springing boughs through which 
the ''fountain of sap "* is sending up its unseen 

*Tyrwhit. 



30 IDEAL LIFE. 

spray, and see the dancing sunshine, and the 
golden green lights sifting betwixt the leaves! 
Mark how each tree grows after its own laws and 
loving desire, each alike, but differing from its 
fellows. Nothing is lacking ; and is the resur- 
rection of the soul's desire less certain ? All 
these might teach us many a truth, of assured 
faith and certain restitution and freedom in the 
appointed way. Note the caprices of the grasses 
and heather— and the wild will of the winds— 
the clouds and flying spray — all following some 
hidden law however — and see how freely their 
life is fulfilled, and they go down into the dust 
to be again surely renewed as in the first, sweet, 
individual fullness of existence. 

While we are longing to bring back the "days 
that are not" — the lost years — they are still with 
us, and have never been parted from our essen- 
tial life. The past is "unforgetable, " as a cer- 
tain strong writer says, and lives in present 
work and present pleasure, in business on Wall 
street, in political elections, in house-building 
and in merry-making. Night and its dreams 
talk of it, and as we lie awake in the late hours, 
the darkness will seem to grow alive,, peopled 
with faces and movements and gestures of the 
past. Our experiences, practical and poetic, 
are the many thresholds which we must cross 
before entering the last household of love, but 



AFTER HIS KIND. 31 

» 

there "our possessions" await us to be ours 
forever. 

I have already spoken of the distinctness of 
the characters of little children. This baby girl 
is full of caprices and fancies, while that one is 
as flexible as soft clay in the hands of one she 
loves. This child is robust and lively, and de- 
lights in whips and guns and dogs, while another, 
more tender, rejoices over the little kitten, cries 
out with rapture at the sight of another baby 
face, and will run after the young brood of yel- 
low, downy chickens all the day long. A third 
will put on a sweet mimicry of maturity with 
her unshapely doll, and rule with zeal over her 
miniature household. 

It is noticeable how true the art of the re- 
naissance is to the individuality of childhood, 
not only the period of dawning youth, audacious, 
joyful and free, in which the Greeks delighted, 
but also the more helpless phases of babyhood. 
There are Correggio's Infants, tender andsmiling, 
who play with palms ; the Children who sing in 
angelic choirs, each face kindled into brighter 
life by the sweet melody; the Assumption of the 
Virgin, with the child angels brightening all 
the air, and the sea of upturned faces from the 
earth ; the Holy Child, who plays wonderingly 
with the fingers of a woman near him. There 
are Raphael's beautiful babes, happy and at 



32 IDEAL LIFE. 

rest in their mother's arms. Raphael so loves 
childhood that even in his School of Athens, 
he has introduced an old man who bears a 
child in his arms, consulting one of the philoso- 
phers concerning the formation of his character ; 
and the child, like Raphael himself on the 
right, does not look at all at the wise men 
present, but at you, the spectator, and plays 
and laughs unabashed. For the child is royal 
in his own unconscious power, and is not 
bent by humanity, but bends humanity into a 
gracious likeness for the while of its own sweet 
ways. 

Fra Angelico's angels are all childlike ; Leon- 
ardo Da Vinci peculiarly excels in his lovely 
rendering of that touching and exquisite solem- 
nity which one sees on the faces of very young 
children ; Michael Angelo's children are strong 
and sad with that look that is marked on the faces 
of a conquered race that was once free, but are 
true to childhood in their silent innocence. But 
above all was Giotto first to give in his paintings 
of the legends of the church, the sanctity of the 
human household, and its centre of love and 
peace — the baby life. As the colors are bright- 
est and the texture softest in that part of the 
flower nearest its germ, or seed, so in the home 
every voice is hushed into softer tones, and every 
face drops its harsher looks when we come into 



AFT£R HIS KIND. 33 

the presence of the child. In our own age our 
first portrait-painters are those who delight most 
in pictures of childhood, as for instance Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. 
No one who has ever seen can forget the sweet 
face of Sir Joshua Reynolds' little strawberry 
girl, that looks as if it had bloomed out in 
some far off country lane, white with blooming 
vines, or his picture of the infant princess with 
the soft white innocent face close beside the 
angry little terrier, or sweetest of all, his picture 
of Penelope Boothby, the four-year-old child 
who used to run to greet her father at his coming, 
and whose death is written, darkest of all, in his 
"Book of sorrows." That little face, under the 
quaint old-fashioned cap, is not like any other 
child; those innocent dark eyes, that tender 
wistful small mouth, were painted for a father's 
eyes, which saw but this one little child — but 
one — in all this wide world. 

I suppose that the deepest insight into the 
distinctive likeness of each soul could only be 
gained in the heaven of little children, for these 
have never passed through our states of doubt, 
deceit and mechanical, lifeless work, but have 
kept fresh and whole the first images of their 
lives. Do you remember Raphael's ideal con- 
ception of an angelic childhood. In his Madon- 
na Di San Sisto are two child-angels, both ador- 

4 



34 IDEAL LIFE. 

ing, both loving, joyous and without fear, but 
utterly distinct from each other. The one rests 
his chin on his soft palm, musing, with the pro- 
found thoughts of infancy, on this strange glory of 
incarnation. The other, with tender cheek lean- 
ing on the little arm, only feels the love and 
light, and rejoices restfully in its shining, with 
eyes full up-raised to the Child Christ. 

When a child dies, the only shadow of his 
death falls behind him. He is ' 'gathered to his 
own." Be you sure that the angels who receive 
him wear his mother's look and likeness. They 
never seem strange or far-off to a little child 
even here. It is very sad for us always when 
the ''little body grows a weary of the great 
world" when the sun ray that trembled on our 
earth awhile is drawn back in light. But heaven 
is for them, more than for older souls who have 
been weaned from its life, a native country 
whose landscapes, white with bloom and dew, 
wear a home sweetness, and whose presence are 
beloved and familiar. Surely at their going 

" Some smiling angel close shall stand 
In old Correggio's fashion, 
Holding a lily in his hand 
For deaths' annunciation." 



THE HUMAN BODY. 35 

I 



CHAPTER III. 



THE HUMAN BODY. 



"teOU touch heaven," says Novalis, "when 
$3) you lay your hands on a human body." 
There is indeed nothing more exquisite on earth 
than this in its full loveliness, so tender, so 
beautiful, so living, that its touch or look seems 
to melt your heart with wonder and love. Some 
faces are like poems ; the soft, moonlit smile 
around the child-like mouth, the long, silken 
lashes, the pathetic and musing eyes, fill you 
with thoughts which no words can tell. The 
swelling curves and fine outlines, the color of 
cheek and lip, and the lighted gloss of the hair, 
have their meaning. Browning writes a poem 
of a lover, who sat by the beloved and motion- 
less figure, and placed in the dead fingers a 
flower, with his troth. He speaks to her still, 
though she cannot hear. 



36 IDEAL LIFE. 

" The time will come — at last it will, 

When, Evelyn Hope, what meant 1 shall say, 
In the lower earth, in the years long still, 
That body and soul so pure and gay ? 
Why your hair was amber, [ shall divine, 
And your mouth of your own geranium's red; 
And what you will do with me in fine, 
In the new life come in the old one's stead." 

All the laws of which we know, act upon the 
human body. It seems to stand as a centre 
between the outer and inner worlds, and the 
lungs of life, breathing out and in, through the 
great processes of incarnation and resurrection, 
have their fullest respiration here. The Hindoo 
avatars, the Greek myths, show how strongly 
the minds of different races had grasped the 
thought of incarnation. Ourselves indeed all 
our life long are incarnating idea and desire into 
fleshy lineament, into form and color. The 
spiritual influences of the high and good are 
continually taking shape and substance around 
them. All these material and solid things about 
us are but some intangible thought in form. So 
also is the great process of resurrection per- 
petually in action, bringing up from the dead 
the vanished good of man's nature, out of lost 
art or science, new inspirations; out of buried 
nationalities, new citizenships ; out of dust and 
stone, cities and gardens of flowers. And we 
believe that man is born into the body, a living 



THE HUMAN BODY. 37 

soul, and arises out of it an immortal spirit. 
The incarnation and resurrection of the divine 
life move the valves of all derived existence, 
and breathe into it the rising and falling breath 
of life. 

By inheritance the spirit of our lives is incar- 
nated in our children. No rare palimpsest, no 
old parchment, over whose strange characters 
the antiquarian lingers, noting the slightest jot 
or curve of the cypher, has so many records of 
old races and years as the fresh, fair child whose 
days seem to have the dew of the morning upon 
them. Our shadows may fall far along this line, 
and our natures are more surely inherited than 
our lands. What is mere habit, custom, man- 
ner in one generation, becomes impulse and 
instinct, or fixed trait, in the next. All 
culture and discipline of character, however 
hard and uneasily borne by the first, are trans- 
muted into facility and special talent in those 
who succeed them. The perfection of handi- 
craft, as of scholarship, is attained only in that 
lineage, where heir after heir assumes the father's 
work, and excellence is a family tradition. All 
intellectual skill and ease, the one gift of genius 
excepted, are transmitted from sire to son, as 
are also all moral graces, save the divine change 
and regeneration. It is thus a race and age 
grows, by little achievements of the individual 



38 IDEAL LIFE. 

life, a fault conquered, a good impulse carried 
into act, a beautiful thing seen or heard. 

We find some curious traces of habits at times 
in the inherited looks and ways of a child, some 
old grandsire's musing in the soft, knitted baby 
brow, and the eyes opened with so puzzled and 
wide a look into the sunlight, some old sorrow 
in the yearning, wistful face of the infant, some 
distorted soul in the distant lineage, disturbing 
those boyish features from their right clearness. 
You see quickly where the mental nourishment 
has been rich and pure, and where the blood oi 
life has run sluggishly. Those lonesome chil- 
dren, who give you a sense of cold somewhere, 
come of adverse or undeveloped natures, nar- 
row and restrained. They are 

"Like sweet bells, jangled out of tune, and harsh." 

Also through the body we are placed in sym- 
pathy with inanimate nature ; our pulses and 
breathings and heart throbs, "beating time and 
keeping time with all the auras and airs of the 
universe." In the Spring our limbs feel the 
stirring of new life, as the trees feel the fresh 
sap flowing through every veined fibre, and our 
fancies seem to follow the winds in their going. 

" For the boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts," 



THE HUMAN BODY. 39 

says the old Northland song. As far away are 
their desires and dreams, as the long sweep of 
this rushing* wind, which goes, no man knoweth 
whither. The phlegmatic faces of peasants in a 
rural district hold something of the slow, stolid 
life of herbs and grasses. Some characters in- 
deed have a woody growth, full of knots and 
nots, and their experiences are excrescences 
rather than inward transformation and increase. 
While man sets his mark of dominion on the 
earth, he gains some likeness also to the things 
among which he lives, and the inhabitants of 
mountain and plain are as unlike as their locali- 
ties. * 

So nature has power to move us, 
Because of the kinship known; 

For the tree and the river live in us, 
And not in their life alone. 

We see in man, whose automatic life is gov- 
erned by the sun — resting at his setting and aris- 
ing at his appearance — a higher life, also, which 
looks upward, and builds for eternity, and 
stands as a central point to many lower lives 
which look downward, which build only for a 
day or a few weeks at most, and whose natural 
pursuits of feeding or hunting are carried on 

*See the feuds between the Highlands and Lowlands in 

Scotland. 



40 IDEAL LIFE. 

with most ardor during the hours of darkness. 
The human and animal natures are inverse to 
each other, and yet by our bodily instincts and 
desires we are also akin to them, when innocent, 
to the happy, careless lives of bright woodland 
creatures; when ignoble, to ravening- beasts and 
things that creep and crawl. If the animal is 
introduced into the household life, he seems to 
feel this bond, and even to catch some shadowy 
resemblance to man. This is especially true of 
the sympathetic and faithful dog. We not un- 
frequently notice a master and dog that are 
excellent companion pieces, so truthfully does 
the humbler comrade reproduce his owner's air 
and bearing. If the man is mortified or de- 
pressed, how quickly the poor dog hangs his 
head as if the trouble were his own, but if the 
master is elate, the creature beside him rejoices 
in his pleasures, and even regards all his fellow- 
dogs, whom he chances to meet on the street, 
with an air of genteel and superior complacency 
which it is comical to observe. Landseer, 
above all other artists, most admirably depicts 
these moods and "society airs" in the canine 
pet, as well as his greater traits of devotion 
and loyalty. 

Art has indeed always recognized in these 
lives, which attend like shadows our own fuller 
existence, a significance, as symbolic, and ex- 



THE HUMAN BODY. 4 1 

pressivc of the principles within us. The old 
Greek artists rarely give you a God or a Goddess 
without its accompanying bird or beast,- or even 
flower. Very often the Christian artist uses con- 
trast as well as sympathy ; but either in one way 
or another, the lower creature is used to tell you 
again the thought which the human figures ex- 
press, forming, as it were, a full and complete 
chord. Albert Diirer adds to the divine inno- 
cence of the Holy Child, the sportive and inno- 
cent ignorance of the dumb creature ; in Titian's 
Holy Family, at the Louvre, the idea of infancy 
and brooding fate are sustained by the tender 
white rabbit and the black lamb lying in the 
darkness of the shadow. Veronese introduces 
a spaniel in his interview between Solomon and 
the Queen of Sheba, as if purposely to contrast 
the petulance of the lower nature with the 
stately converse of the higher. The white dove, 
the lamb and the lily, are continually used in 
Christian art to heighten the ideas of purity and 
innocence, so especially characteristic of its 
conceptions. In the pictures of the Adoration, 
the horned and still cattle at the manger, are 
not without meaning ; they signify by their 
mute presence, the full rounding of the circle 
of worship, which the wise men of the East offer 
to the Infant King of Heaven, and earth and all 
earth's creatures unite in. 



42 IDEAL LIFE. 

But the superior significance of the human 
form, its priority of place, its fullness of mean- 
ing by itself, are never lost sight of in a worthy 
conception. Leonardo da Vinci, in his treatise 
on painting, makes every line and attitude of 
importance, the proud or subdued pose of the 
head, the forward or backward inclination of the 
body, the softness of rounded and childish 
limbs, or the dry and sharp outlines of age, the 
swelling breast of the virgin or the muscular 
arm of the hero. Nothing is too slight to be 
noted, the wrinkle of care, the dimple of youth, 
the shadow beneath the eyes, the proud and 
dilating nostril, the full veins in the throat, the 
delicate and flexible lines of the mouth, are 
each, in its turn, indicative and characteristic, 
to the painter even more than the poet. I have 
told you Robert Browning's beautiful dream of 
Evelyn Hope's fair and girlish face ; going back 
a little farther, we find Rembrandt's etchings of 
human hands, which are full of human history. 
"A master's rapid facility, " says a modern re- 
viewer, "and a master's power are in every 
hand which Rembrandt has drawn prominently. 
Note the fat hands of Renier, Ansloo, — that 
stolid, Anabaptist minister, — and the fine, dis- 
criminating hand of Clement de Jonghe, the 
print-seller, a man accustomed to the deft fin- 
gering of delicate papers. Note too, the nervous 



THE HUMAN BODY. 43 

hand of that brooding student, Haaring, the 
younger, whom one knows to have been some- 
thing finer than a common auctioneer. And for 
physical feebleness seen in an old man's hand, 
mark the wavering hand of Haaring, the elder. 
For physical strength in an old man's hand, — a 
tenacious hand for sure, yet subtle uses, — see 
the sinewy craftman's hand of Lutma." 

There is indeed scarcely a thought or desire 
which does not instantaneously thrill from the 
soul throughout all the nerves and fibres of our 
hands. When warm palm meets palm in the 
grasp of friendship, or touch of love, it is as it 
one spirit had felt the spirit of another. Swe- 
denborg says that the Angels read our ruling 
lives in our hands — written there with unerring 
palmistry — at the judgment of the soul. The 
hands are always true to the life, and change 
with its growth and quality and decay. What 
a difference there is between the little, innocent 
baby-fingers, rosy and clinging — the quick, eager 
hands of the child — the dainty palm of the wo- 
man, with its fluttering pulsations, or the firm 
hand of the man, strong to hold or strike — the 
wasted, groping fingers of the aged — and last 
of all, the cold white hands folded to rest. They 
are all full of significance, for the daily life has 
incarnated itself in them. 

Believe me that the very life of true art is 
the deep acknowledgment of the ' ' awful soul 



44 IDEAL LIFE. 

which dwells in clay," and which cannot be 
ignored or denied without fatal loss. You can- 
not remember this too often. It is because of 
this indwelling presence that love may stretch 
its hand from one world to another, and does 
not know division. You have a friend in India 
perhaps, and one in the next room. You think of 
the one so far off, and the smile — the uplook — 
his little trick or gesture — every mole and scar, 
even, are as familiar, and as fully present as 
the other. This power which the soul holds of 
inward companionship is wonderful. It is not 
limited either by space or time. I suppose that 
we never passed a figure on the street, or spoke 
a forgotten word, or did some trifling act of 
kindness or unkindness, but it w 7 ill arise again 
some day, clear and distinct, within our remem- 
brance. 

"Es kann die spur von unsern Erdentagen 
Nicht in /Eonem untergehn." 

That same law of resurrections which brings 
up the dawn out of the night — the lily from its 
bulb — the chrysalis from the silken cocoon — the 
winged bird from the white oval of the egg — 
the embryo from the womb, and the spirit from 
its dead body, brings to every man, however 
unbelieving and materialistic in theory, a sense 
of living presence when his heart turns to his 



THE HUMAN BODY. 45 

» 

departed. It is like the wonderful resurrection 
morning, this memory of love, in whose dark 
stirs * f life and life and life." 
The father need only see 

"The little shoe in the corner, 

All worn and crumpled and brown, 
Its motionless hollow confutes him, 
And argues his logic down." 

For the tears start, and the little form which he 
misses, flashes back into distinctness and near- 
ness. 

And this soul, which overleaps time and death 
and pain, can it perish in dust? Here again is 
the brute nature inverse from the human. The 
faithful creature pines away, and cannot be com- 
forted, when it no longer sees the face, nor hears 
the voice that it loves, for spiritual vision and 
nearness are impossible to it. The dog howls 
and whines when he is shut out from his master, 
because bodily presence is his all. It is only the 
human heart that " dreams of the absent face 
all day ;" its loss alone is known to the animal. 

The whole personality — soul and body — must 
be comprehended in your love, if you would be 
satisfied. When beauty, or talent, or special 
virtue — rather than the full individual and spirit- 
ual life — is sought for, the regard is incomplete, 
incompetent to accomplish the great work of 



L. 



46 IDEAL LIFE. 

love. You cannot adequately help men if you 
accustom yourself to think of any class as simply 
"hands" or operatives, or if you know them, 
as most men do know each other, only as faces 
and voices. You must go farther than this ; 
— above all, you must see the angel within the 
man or woman — must believe in it, and appeal to 
it above the lower natures. This alone gives 
completeness. If you have not this tender in- 
sight into the hidden humanity you will stumble 
and be hurt, you will be continually disappointed, 
vexed and chilled by the stripping away of illu- 
sions, which is too often the result of daily con- 
tact and intercourse with ideal and enthusiastic 
temperaments. Do not doubt your first vision — 
the lovely image is there — only keep patience and 
love. By such exercise you yourself will grow 
also, and may give new graces of life — the 
highest gifts of all — to the beloved. The high- 
est pleasure that ever comes to one, is to do 
something for those we love, and in this way we 
may give every act and word of our loneliest 
hours to them. When they next see us, they 
will feel the added warmth and light, and our 
most solitary struggles will not have been in 
vain. Far more powerful than persuasion or 
reason, far stronger than physical beauty, is this 
spiritual sphere from a beautiful life. You can- 
not wander to such a distance that it will not 



THE HUMAN BODY. 47 

recall you, and touch you with a thrilling sense 
of its tenderness. 

The commonest things on earth teach us a 
parable of faith in the hidden nature which de- 
sires to grow in others and ourselves. You see 
a knot of gnarled and bare trees, twisted and un- 
comely — for what is so bare as a fruit-tree in 
winter? Cedars keep their greenness, oaks their 
branching symmetry, but these look denuded and 
dead. Wandering back that way in spring, 
you are suddenly surprised, enveloped in a cloud 
of fragrance and bloom. All around you snowy 
and rosy petals drift to the grass, in the air the 
bees are humming, and clusters of buds and 
blossoms touch softly your cheek and brow. 
Your scorn at its former meagreness, is confuted 
and tossed away in sight of this exceeding 
fairness, for you were foolishly blind — all this 
blossoming tree, even then existed potentially 
in the naked and gnarled trunk. 

Such a revelation, and higher, will heaven give 
us of the personality which we misjudge here. 
For we shall all be changed. And against such 
false judgments here the ideal and spiritual 
vision alone guards you. It is very important 
that it should be so, for in these latter days, 
a man's deepest experiences often come through 
personal loves and pains. His oracles of life are 
found in his own household ; and an apocalypse of 



48 IDEAL LIFE. 

love looks out of familiar eyes or touches him 
with a child's lips; and spirit is revealed to spirit 
in the orderly way of common love. A thou- 
sand-fold more blessed than any isolated ex- 
perience is the life that is warm with ties of pa- 
rentage and kindred and friendship. For God 
is the sole possible integer of the whole universe, 
and each human life is only fractional, incomplete 
and imperfect, needing continually other lives 
by which it may more nearly attain unity and 
symmetry. No more hopeless thing can be said 
of any soul than that it is '"left to itself." 



THE NEW INHERITANCE. 49 

t 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE NEW INHERITANCE. 



SpHE strange law of transmission by which our 
bi ideals and characters are incarnated in our 
children is the grand pivotal force which lifts or 
lowers the world. Spiritual forces and laws lie 
behind this, but so far as our merely natural sight 
may go, this is the law of growth or decay in the 
species. All the instinctive and automatic 
movements, even of our moral life, seem to come 
through inheritance. It is thus that the influences 
of a great crisis, or character, are not idly scatter- 
ed abroad and lost, but germinate surely into 
result and purpose. 

A great separation between the new and old 
ages took place in the first century of our era. 
The life of Christ was an open space of burning 
light, in which old ignorances and traditions and 
false glories were utterly shriveled away, and 

5 



5<D IDEAL LIFE. 

strange and luminous forms revealed themselves 
as they moved here and there. In this new at- 
mosphere of intense emotion and wonder, not 
only seers, but many of the common people — 
women and men — the unbelieving- and the faith- 
ful — heard voices and saw visions, as in the 
scenes preceding the birth of Christ. His bap- 
tism and crucifixion, and also the conversion of 
St. Paul* and the day of Pentecost. It is but 
reasonable to believe that new thoughts and 
ideals were evolved from this fervid crisis of heat 
and flame, and so inwrought into the souls of suc- 
ceeding generations by the after period of per- 
secution and struggle, that the whole world was 
visibly uplifted by them. Foremost amongst 
these I discern the new thoughts of human 
unity and forgiveness of injuries. 

From the divine humanity of Christ flowed a 
power,, an enthusiasm, which raised up the face 
of all humanity from the dust, and turned it 
upwards. The early Christians were of many 
races. In Arabia and Parthia and Mesopotamia 
and Judaea and Cappadocia, Phrygia and Pam- 
phylia, in Egypt, in the parts, of Libya about 
Cyrene, at Rome and Corinth, Ephesus and 
Philippi, Smyrna and Sardis, were men and 
women, who, differing in all other things, were 

*Even the men who "journeyed with " St. Paul, heard the 



THE NEW INHERITANCE. 5 I 

as one in the love of their Lord, and in the ex- 
pectation of His return. It is hard for us, in 
these comparatively indifferent and cold days, to 
realize what a strength and comfort in their 
troubles was this mistaken faith in His immediate 
coming. Most of these were people of little 
knowledge, and of altogether earthly conceptions, 
and their yearning pictured to them the sound 
of His voice as awaking them at midnight, or at 
cock-crow, when the dim light first stole into 
their narrow rooms ; or in the long twilights, the 
footsteps on the street might be His ; at noon, 
when the voices of their children sounded from 
the gardens, He might come. At their feasts 
and worship, by the death-beds of their beloved, 
they looked still, seeking to be ready for His 
revealing. Doubless He was always with them ; 
but this thought was a comfort and a stimulus, 
and so permitted to remain with them. All 
who held this faith were naturally drawn close 
to each other. The old distinctions of race and 
class, Greek or Barbarian, bond or free, were 
interfused in this common fire of love, and 
melted away by its fervor. 

Paul speaks of all as ' ' one body, " and I would 
call your attention to this language more espe- 
cially, as closely connected with what I have 
before said of the wonderful significance of the 
human body. After a most beautiful and sym- 



52 IDEAL LIFE. 

metrical declaration of the human oneness in this 
perfect form, he ends with tender persuasion, 
saying "the members should have the same 
care one for another, and whether one. member 
suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one 
member be honored, all the members rejoice 
with it." The spirit of these words, slowly 
leavening- the whole mass, is seen now in all 
noble aspirations and deeds of our century. It 
echoes in the words of Hawthorne, as he de- 
scribes the English poor in Liverpool, "No man 
or woman is clean until the w r hole w r orld is 
clean." There is not one great measure, or 
reform of our day, through which the fibres of 
this root, thought does not strike. We know 
that no soul has received its perfect fulness of 
life and grace and joy, while any soul hungers 
and has need, for we do all receive one of 
another. It is the law of our life that "no man 
liveth to himself" alone; and the whole world 
breathes through every individual aspiring and 
inspiration. In our life; — education, nothing — not 
even sorrow and disappointment arid pain — is 
purposeless ; no human intercourse, even the 
most trivial, is unprofitable or vain. No one 
can be set aside with "I have no need of thee," 
for we all have need, one of another. And our 
growing knowledge of this, is one of the in- 
herited blessings of Christianity. 



THE NEW INHERITANCE. 53 

The other, I have said, is the forgiveness of 
injuries. This is not an impulse of the soul in 
the primitive life of man. Not only is it alien, 
but also utterly antagonistic to all the first wild 
instincts of retaliation — that rude justice, which 
knows no action but punishment — and of ex- 
ultation over a fallen foe. The savage demands, 
like the old Semitic race, an eye for an eye, a 
life for a life ; like Achilles with the body of 
Hector, he rejoices over his dead enemy ; like 
Shylock, he pleads for the pound of flesh from 
the man who derided and mocked him. Among 
all the folk-lore you find the hero is true to his 
friend, tender to the woman who loves him, but 
stern and dreadful to those who hate him. When 
the natural man receives an injury or an insult, 
the hot blood thrills passionately through the 
veins, and the first impulse which the swift brain 
sends along the nerves of action, is the one 
which clenches the hand and braces the arm for 
a blow. Man can, of himself, as soon raise the 
dead to life, raise him out of the cold dust, to 
walk abroad as a living man in the sweet and 
fresh light, as he can pardon and love the foe 
who thwarts him. So true it is, even in the 
human soul and its dealings with other men, that 
"none can forgive sins, save God only." 

So this virtue, as the one act that raises us 
from the natural to the spiritual life, was made 



54 IDEAL LIFE. 

an axis, on which the power of the new age 
turned, and the crucial test of the reception of 
the new and heavenly influence. 

"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our 
debtors." Without this, men rest forever on 
the same dull level of animosity, where wrong 
begets wrong, and feud engenders feud. When 
the disciple is told to forgive seventy times seven 
"his brother," who had offended him, (mark 
how the tender name of kinnship is always 
brought in to aid the feeling of relenting love), 
we see this new power of forgiveness dealt with 
as a weak and untried muscle, which needs con- 
tinual exercise to give it strength and endurance. 
Throughout the long line of the old Gods of the 
Greeks and Romans, you may find wrath, power, 
remorse and cunning, even sensual pleasure, 
deified, for all these things their worshippers 
knew, but you nowhere find the tender presence 
of forgiveness. Even long afterward, ' ' the 
angel of their ideal stretched forth his hands in 
vain," for the barbarian element that smouldered 
in the Church, broke forth again and again in 
anathema and excommunications, persecutions 
and wars against all opposition for many long 
centuries. Men may see the shining truth at 
once, but slowly do they move towards it. 

But we have arisen into a more spiritual plane 
of life and thought. Already have the hearts 



THE NEW INHERITANCE. 55 

and minds of men been somewhat changed by 
the new influx from the heavens. Generation 
after generation have been born of Christian 
parents, and taught these lovely and tender feel- 
ings of the Christian life, and have tried, although 
perhaps feebly, to embody them in their lives, 
and by teaching and inheritance to transmit to 
their children an even stronger tendency toward 
good, Culture and art and philosophy have 
received the light of divine revelation, and hold 
up before the eyes of men exquisite thoughts of 
tenderness and pity and love, which were un- 
known before. 

So that now, when men ask coldly, what 
benefits the influences of Christian thought and 
feeling have conferred upon the world, we can 
point them to this as one, that is palpable and 
visible before the sight of all, that there are thou- 
sands of gentle and generous hearts to-day, not 
only women and idealists, but men, full of the 
vigor of life and practical thought, ' 'so born with 
the influence of centuries of Christian culture in 
their veins, that forgiveness is to them a first im- 
pulse" — a natural and necessary virtue — as it 
Avas not in the old world days. And for whom it 
would be harder to refuse the word of love, to re- 
press the rapture of reconciliation, to turn aside 
from the repentant friend, or the sorrowing 
enemy, than for the old Greek to forgive them. 



56 IDEAL LIFE. 

We begin to feel dimly how imperfect and un- 
symmetrical is that apprehension of justice which 
relegates the evil in Dante's hells, and in the old 
tragedies and romances, to final torture and 
anguish. Wherever a human foot-print goes, 
divine love is there, and forgiveness. The 
warmth of this beautiful ideal of pardon inter- 
penetrates all states and conditions with its sun- 
shine. The true thought of government is no 
longer to the highest minds, the punishment of 
the criminal, but his change, and restoration to 
the society he has wronged. Every man owes 
somewhat to his race and country, which no 
other life can so fully give, and blessed is he 
who restores the fallen to his work and place. 

By gradual steps we have moved from the 
unconscious growth of the individual life "after 
its kind" to its organic connection with all 
nature and all ages, to its share in the human 
unity. History succeeds biographies, and in- 
dividual ideals by long inheritance assume 
stamina and substance as the characteristic 
traits and works of the races. 



TRUE HISTORY. S7 

9 



PART II. — CHAPTER I 



IDEALS AND MYTHS OF THE RACES. 

TRUE HISTORY. 

"Out of the oleic felcles, as men saythe 
Cometh all this ne we corn, from yere to yere." 

Have you not seen, on a summer evening, 
the whole horizon line alive with the crimson 
and fiery gold of sunset, and all the mountains 
lifted into an aerial and transparent glory ? Or 
perhaps you have watched the vision of dawn 
lie along the waters like a revelation of rosy 
light and splendor? It is along this line "where 
earth and heaven meet" that the purest white 
lights, the rarest colors shine and glow ; and 
here it is that every object, whether dark pine, 
or mountain crag, or sail of far off ship, grows 
in clearness and distinctness of outline upon the 
delighted eye. This boundary-line exists in all 
life and wisdom ; in history it is the "love line" 

6 



58 IDEAL LIFE. 

of the race, which you must cross in order to 
read its records truly. As a certain earnest 
thinker says, the Ancient are only secret, be- 
cause we are estranged from them in spirit. If 
one were thoroughly a Hindoo in all the ele- 
ments of will and character, he would find no 
difficulty in the Sancrit, for the possession of a 
nation's ideal is closely followed by accuracy in 
the details of historic facts.* 

If you first feel as a Greek felt, you will soon 
think as a Greek thought, and your language will 
have the true classic grace. To speak a brute's 
tongue, to snarl and hiss, it is necessary that the 
brute's nature with its rending and tearing pro- 
pensities should exist in you. As an artist once 
said, "to paint even a tree, you must become a 
tree yourself," that is, feel with the tree, by 
sympathy excite in yourself the woody and 
fibrous and leaf-growing powers. You have 
those that are analogous, for you are a micro- 
cosm, with a net-work of perhaps hidden sym- 
pathies which should touch all things. 

And you can only see what you have in your 
own nature; if you are passing your brother by 
as a common man, blind to the angel which, I 
have told you, exists in all, it must be because 

*In regard to this question of insight, I owe much to Rus- 
kin's n^ost suggestive lecture on Light and the faculty of 
vision. 



TRUE HISTORY. 59 



your own angelic nature is undeveloped. The 
eagle, with his keen glances, never sees the 
white softness and gentleness of the little lamb 
in his rapid swoop ; it is only a meal to him. 
Thus you should feel and love a thought to un- 
derstand it fully ; and in order to comprehend a 
heroic emotion, you must live it in action, for 
there is no other way. When we apprehend 
this law there will be a great day of judgment 
among our books, and only those illuminated 
by love, will remain. 

We see now that the life of an individual can 
only be truly written, by the "next of kin" 
spiritually. And this veritable inside heraldry 
asserts itself, for no one has insight or power to 
write the experience of a great mind, but his 
heir, on the soul side. Imagine how a practical 
unimaginative pen would fail in telling of Palissy 
who, with the ideal of exquisite color and deli- 
cate relief ever haunting his mind's eye, sought 
so many years in vain for the white enamel, 
until his clothes, food and furniture were gone, 
and even the planks and boards were torn from 
his house to feed the fires of the furnace. There 
is a passage in the recent biographical sketch of 
Sir Edwin Landseer, by Miss Thackeray,, which 
very happily illustrates my meaning. She tells 
us that " in one of the notices upon his pictures 
it is said that, as a boy and a youth, Landseer 



60 J DEAL LJFE. 

haunted shows of wild animals and matches of 
rat-killing by terriers, with his sketch-book. 
Cannot one picture the scene ? — the cruel sport, 
the crowd looking on, stupid or vulgarly excited, 
and there, among coarse and heavy glances, and 
dull, scowling looks, shines the bright, young 
face, not seeing the things that the dull eyes 
are watching, but discerning the something be- 
yond, the world within the world, the life within 
common life, that genius makes clear to us." It 
is just such a shortness of sight as dulled those 
heavy eyes, that so often makes outside facts 
the veriest falsehoods, because wrenched from 
their spiritual connection. So, except by spe- 
cial sympathy of character, it is hard for us to 
understand even the human lives, with which we 
are in close association. For we cannot see the 
true "finis" of the volume; no, nor the begin- 
ning, since each life is a sequel to another in 
rotation, too infinite for us to follow. Very 
often it seems fragmentary and incomplete to 
us ; and even the lower forms of life, the sea- 
weed and the flower, appear to our blinded 
vision more joyous and symmetrical, for we see 
the whole of the life of the rose, but so little of 
man's. 

As for the lives of races, we gain the truest 
insight from the works of men who did not know 
they were forming the rich mosaic materials of 



TRUE III3T0I V. 6 1 

t 

history ; from the artists, who have given us the 
men and the women of their ages, strong and 
warm with the real life-blood of existence, who 
have shown us unconsciously the influences that 
moulded their lineaments, and softened or 
quickened the play of expression. 

For instance, the monastic ideal is more 
vividly seen in the paintings of early Christian 
artists, as in the Byzantine Madonnas, than in 
any writings descriptive of the cloister. There 
is often little beauty of feature about the faces, 
the designs are hard, stiff, angular, the draperies 
ungraceful Nothing is flowing or free ; all is 
repressed, strict and severe. But undoubtedly 
there is an attraction in them, their truthfulness, 
for the artists express therein, without reserve 
or exaggeration, the kind of life which they 
themselves know. It is one of austerity and 
self-denial, limited and restrictive, it is true, but 
with a sense of inner purity, and of freedom for 
the higher spiritual nature. If a sensitive char- 
acter, acutely alive to moral impressions, has 
once committed a wrong act, he will long for 
penance and atonement, and feel undeserved joy 
as a pain. This phase of individual experience 
gives insight into both the self-inflicted penalties 
and privations of the mediaeval saints, and the 
severe mediaeval art of the Byzantine designs. 
In each case it was a reaction against the purely 



62 IDEAL LIFE. 

natural life of the senses and their delights, in 
which the old Greeks rejoiced — a striving after 
the higher spiritual life which is the sign of the 
Christian spirit in all art and achievement. There 
is no face which so fully expresses this, as the 
Delphic Sibyl of Michael Angelo. Here is the 
old Greek thought of the priestess upon whom 
the inspiration of Apollo descends like a mighty 
rushing wind, but in the half averted face, the 
dilated eyes, you see such wonder, such wor- 
ship, such mingled terror and rejoicing, such 
full desire, straining after the glory to be re- 
vealed, as witness that a greater Lord than 
Apollo is here. 

The same thought which prompted the severe 
outlines of Byzantine art, gave to its conceptions 
of Heaven, all the color and delight denied to 
its representations of earth. The ideal of the 
age was concentrated in the ecclesiastic form, 
and everything lovely and rich was used to 
adorn religious thought. The Catholic Church, 
during the seventh century, did not dwell upon 
judgment or the passion of our Lord, or any 
thought of pain, except as connected with sin. 
If this necessitated suffering and penance in the 
earthly life, all on the heavenly side was repose 
and light. The cross at Ravenna was always 
richly and brightly decorated, symbolic, as 
Tyrwhitt says, of our Lord's humanity, rather 



TRUE HISTORY. 63 

t 

than His death. The signs used by the early- 
Christians in the catacombs, many of which 
were adopted from the Greek art, were always 
cheerful and bright, as the Vine, the good Shep- 
herd. The colors of the Byzantine school, in 
their portrayal of angels and saints, were ex- 
quisitely vivid, azure, green, purple, gold, — the 
golden backgrounds of old paintings belonged 
especially to this school — and their colors were 
lighted up by rare crimsons and scarlets. The 
illuminated texts and missals of monastic artists, 
glow with color. You see them bordered with 
golden scrolls and radiant devices of birds, 
flowers and sporting butterflies, ^all child-like 
and joyous in spirit, for it is of heavenly things 
that they treat. You find also in these pictures 
saints with child-angels, lambs or lilies, placed 
beside them as heavenly symbols, golden haired 
women with quiet lips of peace, men with level 
eyes which front the oncoming years with un- 
disturbed serenity, faces of holy infancy, and 
you recognize the influences of the purer catholic 
ideals of womanhood and childhood ; and look 
into the tranquillity of the true priest's life, and 
of his flock who dwelt in simple good. These 
countenances have nothing of the complex ex- 
pression of the faces we see around us, over- 
charged by a quivering electricity of emotion, 
and kept astir by the too highly wrought and 



6\ IDEAL LIFE. 

feverish intellectual atmosphere and conditions 
of our modern life. 

There are many ways in which history may 
be studied, and no one method is complete 
without aid' from the others. You may gain the 
facts of outward chronicles, and take it in 
mosaic, land by land, king after king, with the 
small details of each reign and country and 
class, until you see it as a picture, brilliantly 
colored and moving, in the costume and after 
the manner of the age. You may study history 
in cycles, according to the plan of Buckle and 
Humboldt, measuring the outlines of the grandly 
flowing curves of progress in which the ages roll 
on. Or you may study it in groups of contempo- 
raries, linking country to country, and watching 
the strange electric touch which starts kindred 
movements and desires into life under antago- 
nistic circumstances. Such, for instance, were 
the coincident currents of the Renaissance in 
Italy and the Reformation in Germany ; and 
such also, were the perpetually recurring up- 
heavals of the Republican form of thought all 
over the face of Europe in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. You can form no thorough conception of 
any age if the country or the man, which you 
study, stands alone in your thought. 

You cannot learn adequately the story of the 
first — and highest — school of Greek art. that in 



TRUE HISTORY. 65 



which lived traces of spiritual motive,* without 
knowing that when Phidias w r as a sculptor in 
Greece, marking out with swift and sure strokes 
the outlines of hero and God, Pericles and 
Aspasia ruled at Athens, and it was the age of 
Aristophanes, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and 
/Eschylus, and greatest of all, Socrates, whose 
endurance, faith and patient courage approaches 
the highest ideal of humanity. Not one of these 
was possible in all his perfection without the 
mingled influences of the others, and the age, 
the Greek race, the common Athenian, received 
of them all in some measure. 

Looking down the path of modern culture, 
you pause at one luminous era, and there you 
see how each star seems to kindle another into 
greater glory. In Germany there are Diirer 
and Holbein and Quentin Matys, Erasmus and 
Luther, and you see the spirit of the last re- 
former and believer, at work in the profound 
spiritual significance of such paintings as the 
hands of Diirer and Holbein wrought. In Spain 
there is the grave, patient, knightly figure of 
Columbus, seeking for liberty to explore the 
unknown seas, and realize his haunting visions 
of the unseen southern lands. Savonarola, in 
Florence, is acknowledging Christ as king upon 
earth, master of his own city and people, and 

*Tyfwhitt's " Christian Symbolism." 



66 IDEAL LIFE. 

Michael Angelo hearing- him, is stirred to the 
depths of his mighty soul, and all his art hence- 
forward will bear the seal of the spirit of Christ, 
and strive after the highest ideal. In Venice 
are old Bellini, Giorgione and Titian, and before 
the century has passed, Raphael and Correggio 
have entered -into life. Fra Angelico, most 
spiritual and child-like of artists, has made 
glorious the convent walls of San Marco ; and 
Rome glitters with procession and revelry, as 
rich in color and light as the Venetian school of 
art, but there are fair faces seen there, from 
which Angelico's angels would look away sor- 
rowing. 

In England the conditions are prepared from 
which shall spring her most heroic and gentlest 
natures, her sweetest singers, her most learned 
and wisest statesmen — Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, 
Shakspeare, Jonson, Burleigh, Bacon. Every- 
where you see the intense vitality of this cen- 
tury, 1400-1 500 manifesting itself, in exploration 
and reformation, art and song and life ; among 
every people, and with every man, " after its 
kind," He, who is spiritual, feels the presence 
of his master, and sees His glory in inspiration 
of religious teaching and artistic vision. The 
earthly nature touches only the hem of His 
garments and knows a rarer loveliness in color 
and grace of outline, more swiftly moving pulses 



TRUE HISTORY. 6/ 

9 

of action and life. But always it is the same 
Life, which stirred in the wonderful activity and 
intellectual light of the Greeks, in the power of 
the revival from the dark ages, in all freedom 
of enslaved races, in all that is ours of the 
beautiful and good now. 

And that we may more fully apprehend the 
operation of this life, which is the centre and 
source of all activity, we must add to all other 
methods of studying humanity, some knowledge 
of the spiritual or inner life of the nations — the 
ideals of the ages — the myths and legends of the 
races, which indeed enfold the future as a matrix 
does a stone. It is impossible to possess a full 
insight into the conditions of life as Athens and 
its mental atmosphere in the time of Phidias, — 
which I have mentioned as the culminating 
period of Greek art — without remembering that 
many Athenians believed in the tales of Hero- 
dotus of the great ghost who fought at Mara- 
thon, delighting in conflict as in the earthly life, 
of Apollo's presence at Delphi, and of the form 
seen in mid-air at Salamis. These spirits and 
Gods were like the Greeks themselves, with all 
human instincts of scorn, vehement wrath, par- 
tisanship, not like the visions of the Hebraic 
seers, which, with grand angelic patience, com- 
fort and cheer, but wholly resembling man, and 
so, thoroughly characteristic of the Greek mode 
of conception. 



68 IDEAL LIFE. 

All the morning dreams of the nations are 
prophetic. You cannot neglect to explore the 
first dim twilight, 

For the dusk of the dawn is astir with the wings 
Of invisible things ; 

And the world is awakened, and throbs with a strain 
Betwixt passion and pain. 

You do not know Rome without the folk-story 
of the twin brothers suckled by the fierce wolf, 
for upon that is outlined in long shadow, the 
active Roman nature with its fierce passion for 
contest and dominion ; nor without the sylvan 
myth of Egeria, possible only in the first glow 
and white heat of poetic conception, for it indi- 
cates well the capacity of the Roman mind for 
intense and loity contemplation. The Homeric 
legends are deeply impressed with the artistic 
nature of the Greeks ; with few swift words 
they paint for you. " Hector, dearest to his 
mother's heart," " speed renowned Achilles;" 
and the cool back-grounds of rest, "Scaman- 
der's grassy vale," wave-worn Eionae, " and 
" pleasant Aulis," from which the warriors come 
to the beleaguered city. You are detained by 
no meaningless detail of costume or circum- 
stance. It is the pure epic treatment, in which 
the noble and stately figures of old stand forth 
as clear and distinct as a bas-relief, or freize. In 



TRUE HISTORY. 69 



Hector's grand farewell, the most consummate 
passage of the whole Iliad, you pass on, from 
the strain, solemnly sweet as far-off music, 
which begins- — 

" Mourn not, my loved Andromache, for me 
Too much," 

to that noble aspiration 

" To drink the cup 
Of liberty before the living gods." 

without a jar or break in its heroic pathos, and 
divine self-abnegation. 

Again in the old British tradition of King 
Arthur of the Round Table, which the Anglo- 
Saxon mind has so eagerly adopted, you find a 
struggle between warring elements, higher and 
more complex spiritual emotions, a heroic life 
at conflict with lower natures, a new world of 
thought and action, wholly alien to the unity 
and calm of the Greek ideal, and seething with 
a spirit of unrest and aspiration, which sins, and 
repents and falls, and would fain expiate its fall. 
From the distinct black and white of the classic 
coloring we come suddenly upon grays and 
blended shades and tints and wavering lights of 
a new civilization. 

I would like to have you pause here for one 
moment, and remark one thought which, amid 



JO IDEAL LIFE. 

all their differences, is common to these mythic 
stories. Before and after, the life extends into 
peopled and luminous regions. You know King 
Arthur was of supernatural kinship, and after his 
wound, was carried away to the enchanted island, 

" Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly." 

The white teachers of the Mexicans and 
Indians came from an unknown land, and re- 
turned thither. The line of ancestry with all 
the Homeric heroes is traced back to Olympus. 
"Sons of the Gods " are they all ; do you know 
how much this means, and do you remember 
the last words of that wonderful line of shep- 
herds, kings and captives: — " Enos, which was 
the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, 
which was the son of God?" The divine Life 
in all these, you see, sustains, enfolds, and re- 
ceives again the lives to which it has given birth, 
and this belief was not likely to have been for- 
gotten in the troubled and dark periods in which 
most of these legends arise. They are elabor- 
ated in happier moments, but their first utter- 
ances were to eager eyes and ears of listeners, 
who knew not what to-morrow would bring forth 
of doom, and whose yesterdays were too dark 
to rivet their thoughts upon their meagre out- 
lines. 



TRUE HISTORY. /I 

It is against the dusky background of our 
needs that we delineate the shining figures of 
our desires. These ideals of a race are the high- 
tide marks to which the great floods of thought 
arise in a time of passionate surging and up- 
heaval ; presently the waves descend to the 
common level, but these are left behind as wit- 
nesses of their unseen powers. And some men, 
who have force enough to incarnate in them- 
selves a nation's desires, become, by virtue of 
these, representative men ; as was Bonaparte, 
with his wonderful and magnetic sway over the 
stormy minds of France. In the general disso- 
lution of old bonds, social ties, ecclesiastic re- 
straints, the power of personal will and char- 
acter ruled without a counterbalance ; and no 
one ever more fully expressed the force and 
scope of an individual than this self-poised, self- 
raised ruler of men. And this power, limited, 
if you will, with the seeds of decay in it, was 
for a while supereminent because it was the 
thought of France, that every man was in him- 
self a force, and held his rights from his person- 
ality alone, and not from any ancestry, noble or 
ignoble. So the call of Napoleon vibrated 
through the French soul, and awakened a na- 
tion, because he was, for a period, the incar- 
nation of France. 4 ' Vous qui niaimez, suivez 
moi. 



72 IDEAL LIFE. 

There is always a certain symmetry in history. 
Every historic event is the meeting or concur- 
rence of two forces, and every movement has in 
itself certain dramatic relations. It requires 
genius to apprehend and display the outlines 
and colors of the times ; and an inferior mind 
blurs both, as he sees, and as he tries to repro- 
duce them. But the apprehension of this mean- 
ing and symmetrical movement finds expression 
with two classes of minds ; the first, develop it 
in life, and are the men of action ; the second give 
it form in winged and fiery words, and often 
sound the key in which the whole after theme 
is set. 

For we are told that everything in nature, 
and also life, has its own key-note. If you 
touch it on a bridge, or in a building, the whole 
structure is jarred from foundation to summit ; 
sound it out in the open air, and everything 
formed upon this note, trembles in accord. So 
it is with a life, a soul, a nation, even an age, it 
thrills through and through when its ideal, the 
ideal of its dreams, its needs, its desires, is 
uttered. Rouget de Lisle, in his wild song — 

' l E?ifans de la patrie ! Lejour de gloire est arrive!" 

sounds all the passionate love and hope which 
beheld their fulfillment as in an ecstacy of vision; 



TRUE HISTORY. 73 

I 

and if we can grasp that volcanic era of upheaval 
at all, we can d d so by the ' ' Marseillaise " as fully 
as by volumes of history. 

As in a plant, if you go back through all the 
different phases of growth, the fully opened 
flower, the faintly tinted bud, stem, and sprays 
of green leaves, back to the little seed, you may 
find enclosed there the whole of the after de- 
velopment of fruit and flower. Or, as some- 
times in music, the air is played in a soft, low 
prelude, and gradually flows off through varia- 
tions of intricate harmony, in all of which, how- 
ever, the same air sounds and reappears. So 
we say, "History repeats itself," and "The 
voice of the past is the prophecy of the future. 
The Germans of Tacitus are easily recognized 
by us in the Germans of the present. The 
Franks express in their very name, as we first 
see it, the desire for freedom, of which their 
whole history is a struggle. The Jews, whom 
we see in our cities and streets, are the same 
exiles that dwelt in the far-off land of Egypt 
under the dynasty of the Pharaohs, for historic 
lineaments are not easily effaced, even in every 
diversity of country and climate, outside contact 
and influence. No footsteps are so entirely lost 
here that the path of a race does not lie before 
us, plainly traceable through every intersection 
and winding curve. 



74 IDEAL LIFE. 

Modern history is far more varied in its con- 
ditions than the old, for it includes that with 
additional elements. We have what might be 
called a parallax in our civilization, for it con- 
tains three points of measurement — our own 
history and the influences of Greek and Roman 
modes of thought on the minds of our men of 
culture, and everywhere the full oriental life, in 
all its details of dress, manner, daily salutations, 
laws, and customs of the household ; the whole 
organization and its eastern background of city 
and landscape, inwrought into our life through 
the medium of the Hebraic Scriptures. 

In the primitive life of man there are three 
events which are characteristic, the journey, the 
feast, and the battle, and none of these are with- 
out meaning, but illustrate certain principles in- 
herent in his nature. Each one of these is 
predominant in one of the above races ; the 
journey finds its fullest expression in the ever 
wandering Shemitic tribes, the feast in the joy- 
ous Greek life, and the battle, in the struggling, 
warring and restless movements of the Germanic 
races, from their earliest Scandinavian records. 

First let us consider then what we shall call 
the Hebraic Spirit of Pilgrimage, but which has 
also existed in more restrained forms in all the 
ages and nations of which we have record. 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 75 



CHAPTER II. 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 
"Arise, and let us go hence." 

SPHE journeyings of the races are full of mean- 
bi ing, both in their out-comings and their 
on-goings. There seems to be a certain migra- 
tory instinct in the breasts of men, often peri- 
odical in its manifestations, which impels, not 
only individuals like the old Normadic heroes 
and modern explorers, but vast masses of men 
to roll their living tides towards the East or West 
or South. Many such moments in history recur 
to our remembrance. What is more pictur- 
esque than the youthful Alexander with his 
haughty Greeks in the richly colored land of 
India ; or more thrilling than the invasions of 
the infidel Saracens in Christian Europe, or the 
fright of the Saxon households, seeing far off 
the ships of the fierce and cruel Danes, swooping 



7 6 IDEAL LIFE. 

down upon their shores ? It is true that the 
new races bring with them new elements of 
thought, new germs of life, but their coming 
augurs decay and woe to the old. 

Amidst all the fanaticism of the crusades, our 
hearts beat high as we think of the mailed 
warriors crossing the hot desert sands to seek 
Jerusalem, the "City of the Vision of Peace/' 
for many were, doubtless, moved by earnest 
and vital faith ; but there is only burning indig- 
nation for the invasions of South America and 
Mexico by the Spaniards, the strange white 
warriors, who slay and drive before them the 
simple-hearted and ignorant races of the soil. 
Among all these ages of exploration and migra- 
tion, there is one, far back, before which we 
hold our breath with terror and wonder — Rome, 
sitting careless and at ease, the face of her Fate 
veiled before her, while horde after horde, tribe 
after tribe, sweep down in hurried multitudes 
from the dark forests of Germany, under Alaric, 
Odoacer and Theodoric, to be followed after- 
wards by the Asiatic Huns, fierce and terrible, 
led by Attila, the "scourge of God," and cover- 
ing the land like a thunder-cloud of doom. We 
approach the most awful, the grandest crisis in 
all history, when the Roman legions, a people 
of fierce countenance and strange tongue, have 
descended upon Jerusalem, and it is said unto her 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 7/ 

t 

in the most solemn of all recorded warnings, 
"If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in 
this thy day, the things which belong unto thy 
peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes." 
And the Master, beholding the city, "wept 
over it." 

The same spirit of Exodus, which guided the 
older races, has been continually alive and astir 
in our own nations. We could not perhaps give 
a stronger evidence of the power of faith in an 
ideal vision, of the desire for the " new earth," 
than the story of Columbus, bearing the cross 
to a strange country, and cheered in his despair 
by a vision in the night, and that other homelier, 
but more pathetic life, of Livingston in Africa, 
seeking to heal "the open sore of the world." 
But the same impulse exists everywhere. In 
every New England village, 

" Each road leads downwards to the sea, 
Or landward to the west." 

and every child dreams, even in his father's 
arms, of the strange, white fields of snow and 
ice, or the lands of sunshine and feathery palms. 
Among the old Shemitic tribes, however, ex- 
istence was a perpetual journey to and fro, and 
the whole of Hebraic history is full of the records 
of movement and change. Abraham goes into 
a far country, Joseph is sold among a strange 



7$ IDEAL LIFE. 

people, Moses led the Israelites forth from 
Egypt, after their entrance into Canaan they 
are carried as captives into Babylon, in the days 
of Ahasueras they are found "from India even 
unto Ethiopia," everywhere alien and yearning 
for their great city, Jerusalem. The words of 
Paul are full of memories of his own people 
through many far-back years. 

"In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in 
perils of robbers, in perils by mine own country- 
men, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the 
city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the 
sea, in perils among false brethren ; in weariness 
and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked- 
ness," . . . "in deaths oft." 

It is not strange that a man, whose life has 
been such as this, and whose fervid temperament 
has burned every experience in distinct charac- 
ters upon his eager mind, should use images 
drawn from it in his teachings of the spiritual 
life. He says of the followers of the new light 
that has arisen upon the world, that they "seek 
a country" and a city "which hath founda- 
tions;" and calls them "strangers and pilgrims 
upon earth," unfolding before their sight the 
long, pathetic record of the banished and exiled, 
"who wandered about in sheep-skins and goat- 
skins ; being destitute, afflicted, tormented ; (of 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 79 

whom the world was not worthy ;) they wan- 
dered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens 
and caves of the earth." 

Mark here the ardor and vehemence with 
which this man, the culmination of long Hebrew 
ancestries, and at the same time the announcer 
of salvation to the Gentiles, speaks to his listen- 
ers, Imagine the fire with which he heaps cir- 
cumstance upon circumstance, the restrained 
passion of that sudden parenthesis — -("of whom 
the world was not worthy ") — the swift, pathetic 
changes of tone, as in "perils by mine own coun- 
trymen," and in his exquisite reply to Agrippa's 
saying, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a 
christian." I give it in full — 

' ' And Paul said, I would to God that not 
only thou, but also all that hear me this day, 
were both almost, and altogether such as I am, 
except these bonds." 

I know of no parallel except that plaintive 
after-thought of Hamlet, as Polonius says to 
him, "My honorable lord, I will most humbly 
take my leave of you," and he replies, "You 
cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will 
more willingly part withal, — except my life, ex- 
cept my life, except my life !" and this falls far 
below the reply of Paul in dignity and pathos. 

Imagine also in union with the rapidity and 
fire of his speaking, that wonderful spirit of 



80 IDEAL LIFE. 

adaptation by which this wanderer in many 
lands seizes the characteristic form of thought 
among the people whom he addresses, as in his 
beautiful speech to the Athenians, and fills it 
with the magnetic power of a higher thought. 
He is a poet as well as an orator, his language 
is full of force, as in that expression, ' ' the weak 
and beggarly elements, " how it rings with scorn ! 
and full also of rare grace and delicacy and fiery 
music which thrills through you like the call of 
the trumpet. There are no poems in human 
language more beautiful than his praise of 
charity, and that grand summary of all heroic 
history in Hebrews, from which I have already 
quoted, the wonderful cry of triumph over 
death in the discourse on the resurrection, the 
exquisitely tender address to the Romans. — 
"There is therefore now no condemnation," 
when like antiphonal music, the quick, sharp 
questioning, the sure, full responses, burst into 
one rythmical passionate utterance of faith in 
4 'Him that loved us." 

By a strange contrast this man, — most essen- 
tially in character and genius a Hebrew — ^has 
been pre-eminent in influence through all the 
centuries that witnessed the lowest degradation 
of his people. For the after life of his race 
verified his pathetic history of their past — "des- 
titute, afflicted, tormented." In every land you 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 8 1 

find this melancholy and alien eastern tribe, 
existing among strange races as an unsolved 
problem, an unsettled fact, isolated from their 
fellows, despised and reproached. Everywhere 
you might see the figure of the Hebrew, with 
swarthy coloring, sharply defined lineaments, 
bright and piercing eyes, and shoulders bowed 
as if beneath heavy burdens. The laws and 
enactments of each land has its separate code 
for the "Jew," each language has expressions 
of scorn identical with their name, the priest- 
hood in metaphors and hyperbole borrowed from 
the Hebrew seers, fulminate anathemas against 
them. There are few writers on whose pages 
this, dark, sad face does not appear. You see 
in Dante, in Skakspeare, Byron, Lessing, and 
Croly, the mark of their presence. Everywhere 
they are suspected and reviled, but even the 
common language of their oppressors is imbued 
with the rich flavor and the strong pathos of the 
old Hebraisms. Look at England, and see 
these same people who so shrink from contact 
with the Hebrew — they meet together in silence 
and night, with the awful heavens keeping 
watch overhead, to listen at the peril of their 
lives to the "serious and pulsating tones" of 
the Hebraic visions. Is not this a strange pic- 
ture? M. Taine says, "I have before me one 
of the old, square folios, in black letter, in which 
8 



82 IDEAL LIFE. 

the pages, worn by bony fingers, have been 
patched together. Hence has sprung much of 
the language of England, and half of English 
manners ; to this day the country is biblical ; it 
was this big book which had transformed Shaks- 
peare's England. To understand this change, 
imagine these yeomen, these shop-keepers, who 
in the evening placed the Bible before them, 
and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read 
one of its chapters." 

Mrs. Charles says of the Hebraic biographies 
of scripture that they "have no ends, only 
beginnings;" they seem to stretch, like the gol- 
den arrows shot from the sun, far into infinite 
regions of space and light, and are only gone 
from our vision. 

If on my narrow ledge a sunbeam falls, 

Steals on from stone to stone — then glides away, 

It is not lost because drawn back in light, 
Although no more we see it." 

The spirit of separation and of the new crea- 
tion is in these lives of the Hebrew histories and 
the gospel of the Hebrew disciples, and wher- 
ever they come in contact with a nation's heart, 
a new race seems to be born of them. Full of 
divine affections, and of germinative and creative 
forces, they are continually forming, as it were, 
a new people, strong to resist and renew. It is 



THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 83 

a re-birth, more wonderful than the Renaissance 
from the Greek life in the fifteenth century, for 
it is not only a quickening of latent forces, but 
a change from an old antagonistic life to a new 
and diverse form of vitality. 

Among the laughter-loving, mercurial, rest- 
less French, we are surprised to find the grave 
and simple Huguenots, who are kindred in blood 
but alien in spirit. The divine afflatus is breathed 
forth, and out of Italy and Spain, lands worldly, 
self-indulgent, and intoxicated with sensual 
delights, there arise Savonarola, with his stern 
reproofs of tyranny and unfaithfulness, Loyola 
and Xavier, terrible in self-abnegation, whose 
arduos toils and foot-sore journeys stand isolated 
and dark against a background °f ease an d 
pleasure. 

" Laetitiae, deliciae, 
Et coronata vino." 

Have they all left, mother and kindred, going 
into strange and barbarous countries with words 
of mysterious import, telling of the spiritual life 
that lies beyond and within our earthly days. 
The eyes of the woman who loved them best, 
would not recognize their wan faces, marred by 
fastings and vigils. They have cast off the 
things that are behind, and the world knows 
them no more, except as wonderful forces of 



Cl 



84 IDEAL LIFE. 

organization and exploration. I do not say that 
it is well that the personal life should be denied, 
— for I believe that is also a divine gift — but I 
would have you mark the power of this influence 
which impels them. 

Among the English, hard-fighting, deep drink- 
ing, stolid, delighting in roistering revels, — 
'•Shakspeare's England," as M. Taine calls it, — 
we discover suddenly the Puritans, of sober 
visage and speech, and grave demeanor, whose 
longings are for eternal ends, and who count no 
privation or toil hard, that is endured for im- 
mortal glory. Their garments were uncouth 
and their language strange to their very brethren 
and country-people, — although, as Kingsley 
points out, the England of to-day, in garb and 
custom, is a Puritan England. But they were 
an alien and a new people then, and it was 
against antagonism and ridicule and bitter 
hatred, that they established their place, and 
became the nuclei and bases of new movements 
in other lands. And as all these arose in an age, 
indifferent and adverse, so will others, born of 
the life of the eternal Word, arise in their turn, 
to renew continually the old and decaying life 
of the world. 

" In journeyings often," . . " in deaths oft." 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 85 



CHAPTER III. 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 



Whose soul records not the great debt of joy, 
Is stamped forever an ignoble man." — Sophocles. 



fHE life and ideal of the Greek race are 
altogether different. From the valleys 
come the bleating - of flocks and lowing of herds ; 
you .hear everywhere the ' ' trickling of invisible 
brooks," and see from mountain heights the 
small crafts as they glance over the bright 
waters of the inland sea. A temple stands on 
every high promontory — as if a-tip-toe to greet 
the sun ! — so that every mariner might see it as 
his ship drew near, and give thanks to the Gods 
of Greece. It rises above the mysterious gray 
of the dim olive trees which form so lovely a 
relief to the white outlines of the marble, — 
glittering, not only with sunshine, but with 
golden bucklers that gleam across the architrave, 



86 IDEAL LIFE. 

and with tints of vermillion and blue, — and 
flashes back the rich light and color which pour 
upon it through the pure air. Farther inland 
are the cool, green forest shadows of oaks and 
cork and lime trees, the glad splashing of water- 
falls, and the subtle, uncertain fragrance of 
citron and almond flowers. There are daffodil- 
covered meadows where Persephone might de- 
light to wander again ; and at Athens, as that 
lovely fragment of a most artistic work, "A few 
days in Athens," tells us, the Illissus glides, like 
pale silver, through the soft, sweet twilight. 

It seems to have been given to the Greeks 
above all other races, to hear the pulses of earth 
and sea beat with distinct meaning and life. 
They were a people of quick vitality, vigor and 
joyousness, delighting always in the open sun- 
shine and the fresh sea breezes, peopling every 
lonely and silent place with their own imaginings 
until nature seemed nowhere mute or dead to 
them. They threw their own life into every- 
thing, and felt an answering thrill run through 
even wood and stone at their touch. Taine says 
of their architecture, that they endowed it 
"with the grace, the diversity, the unforeseen 
and fleeting suppleness of a living thing. " Even 
their dreams they pictured as floating down 
from a green twilight of tangled leaves and 
boughs into their slumbers. 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 8? 

Was a Greek moved to special gladness ! 
Then on the mountain-tops the Bacchantes smote 
the earth in their wild revelries of dance and 
song-; a lively measure piped along the glades, 
and through the low branches of the gnarled 
oaks, shaggy and horned creatures looked out. 
The Napaae crept up from the rustling thickets, 
and the Naiads stirred the springs and streams 
with a sudden ripple and splash. The lonely 
heights, haunted by soring wings, and winds of 
night, were alive with simple, sylvan creatures, 
and woods and grassy fields were full of their 
footsteps, and swift, shy motions. And when 
the Greeks heard the twittering of new fledged 
broods in the boughs overhead, when the young 
calves and lambs cried in the fold, and the fruit 
trees burst into bud, then they said that Deme- 
ter or Pan, had visited the homes of their wor- 
shippers. 

You deny the old myths of the Gods, 

And yet their life lives on. 
It throbs in your passionate pulses, 

And wakes the dream in the stone. 

For the love and the thought and the power, 
Of the human heart were these, 

And the love and the thought and the power, 
Still rule the earth and the seas. 

Across the wind-swept grasses, 
You pass with laughter and jest, 

— Lo, Artemis slowly arises, 

And you straightway forget the rest. 



88 ]DEAL LIFE. 

In the wonder of still white ligh! 

Which shines above the wold. 
The mist of shadowy splendor, 

The glimmer upon the fold. 



The love which an imaginative young person 
of the nineteenth century feels for Nature is 
wholly impersonal, and without form. It reveals 
itself to him in some radiant moments by moods 
of ecstasy and wonder and swift delight, but all 
the while he knows that his Artemis is a myth. 
The spring moonshine, "the sweet, fleet, silvery 
April showers," the soft airs, may awaken joy 
within him, but it is because of their own glad- 
ness, their own special loveliness and grace, not 
as signs of the presence of Athene, queen of 
the air. But imagine the effect upon a young 
Greek who believed, — to whom Athene and 
Artemis were divine persons, — whose concep- 
tions were so full of strange vitality and hu- 
manity, that they incarnated every power of 
nature. The vividness of such ideas must have 
been strongly increased by the mythical asso- 
ciations attached to all the Greek and Roman 
localities. As the low moon rose over Latmos. 
and her faint gleam fell on garden pools and 
dripping fountains, such an old story as the love 
of Endymion would be remembered. Through 
the ineffable glimmer and glamour of moonlight, 
Artemis might seem to smile, and every sound 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 89 

would easily appear the sweet, soft flutings of 
Arcady, or the quivering of silver wings rustling 
as if to take flight. Even in the winter days, 
when earth falls asleep, the unfrozen sea beat 
against the shore with tumultuous and joyous 
waves, and brought dreams of the Nereids and 
Poseidon, and the Triton, blowing his wreathed 
shell. 

This rollicking merriment of nature, this fes- 
tival spirit of existence, is comprehended with 
difficulty by the inhabitants of colder countries, 
who spend so many months in the colorless and 
monotonous occupations of in-door life. What 
has the dark, sad Hebrew exile in common 
with the jesting Athenian ? The Gods of the 
northern tribes, Odin and Thor and Freya, 
whose mighty footsteps are heard in night and 
storm, are not like these homely and sensuous 
deities, whose " inextinguishable laughter" rings 
through their council halls. The Hellenic 
thought of a God is, like the Hellenic thought 
of nature, so akin to humanity, that both the 
elements of divinity and nature are almost for- 
gotten at times beneath the human likeness so 
stamped upon them. The little children who 
played on the streets of Athens might have 
looked into the sweet, mocking faces of Eros 
arid Anteros Avithout surprise. Psyche, be- 
loved by Cupid, found no bar to Olympus, the 



90 IDEAL LIFE. 

human friendships and loves of the Gods were 
many, and often sought in most ignoble guise. 
In this masking of divine life under lower forms, 
you will find not only a double, but a manifold 
significance; not only the " picturesque super- 
stitions of the many, but the finer intuitions of 
the few," and these from several races. 

There are the traditions of the early inhabi- 
tants of Greece, afterwards helots or serfs, in 
which W. H. Pater says one may trace (i some- 
what of the quiet brooding of a subdued people" 
— the moan of a dying nationality, — and the 
quick, clear-cut thoughts of their masters, the 
artistic race of later Greeks. There are also the 
myths of the Etruscans or Romans, and the 
Thersalians and Phrygians, on which the purer 
Greek culture set its supreme and inimitable 
mark. Hence we have those divine doppelgangcrs 
of old mythology, Cybele and Demeter, Athene 
and Artemis, Kore and Persephone, ol two-fold 
nature and name. 

The whole history of the Gods might be said 
to be one of transformation and disguise. De- 
meter, seeking for her lost child, sits down by 
the wayside in the guise of an old and wrinkled 
woman, and the four princesses of Eleusis, as in 
our own fairy stories, which are surviving frag- 
ments of the elder myths, come down to the 
well, and give her water to drink, not seeing 
her divine nature. 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 9 1 

» 

" For the Gods are hard for men to recognize." 

{Homeric Hymn.) 

Zeus comes to earth as a flame, a shower of 
gold, a swan, a white bull, and under the human 
form of Amphitryon. There is in these myths 
profound spiritual significance to the spiritual 
soul ; there is also the human likeness and 
human sympathy of which the old religion is 
full, — " Thou thoughtest that I was altogether 
such an one as thyself, " — there is the intense and 
acute delight in the life and changes of sea and 
earth and sky, whose history is told in these 
forms ; and lastly, the pleasure in successful 
artifice and disguise, which the narrations of 
the Iliad and the Odyssey show as so prominent 
a trait of the subtle Greek mind. Ulysses, on 
his return, goes not to his own home, or his 
father's without disguise, and under a feigned 
form, Minerva attends the journeyings of his 
son. To sustain such masking with success, 
or to penetrate it in another, was alike full of 
delight to the Hellenic nature, so rapid in per- 
ception, so ready in wit. 

The domestic life of the Greeks was like a 
brilliant picture, every article of household use, 

'• Every robe and hanging ornament," 

was full of beauty and grace. Their dwellings 
were richly decorated, walls, ceilings and doors, 



92 IDEAL LIFE. 

but chiefly with metallic colorings of gold, silver 
and bronze, whose glitter and shade were ex- 
quisitely blended with the deep red of vermillion. 
This, contrasting most finely with the gleam of 
metals was therefore the color generally chosen, 
although blue, light ochre, and green, as at 
Pompeii, which was a provincial and mixed 
town, were occasionally used. Their feasts were 
merry with song and dance, and swift, flashing 
jests. Indeed, every meal, although for the 
most part frugal, and often consisting only of 
figs and honey-cakes, salt fish and barley bread, 
was a festival to the joyous spirit of the Greeks. 
So too was every incident in the picturesque, 
busy life of the laborer ; the mowing, the reap- 
ing, the threshing of the gathered grain, the 
binding of the ripe corn. All these were acts 
of worship to the Gods who loved their race, 
with a partial, petulant affection it is true, but 
yet who looked upon them with favor and guar- 
dianship, and who passed along their ways with 
desire and rejoicing, and rested on their moun- 
tain sides, "dusky with woods," or in their 
fields, wet with dews of the summer nights. 

Even Demeter Erinnys, the awful and pas- 
sionate Mother Earth, cared for the young 
lambs and little children ; and there was always 
some God who would pity and help a wanderer 
on his journey, though it were a flight from the 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 93 

• 

wrath of another deity ; — some flying bird or 
rippling stream, to cheer him with a sign of 
hope. So far as it was possible they eschewed 
the very names of ill omen and pain, being 
specially endowed with that cheerfullness of 
temperament which springs from powerful vi- 
tality and perfect health. Hope was their 
supreme virtue, which overleaps evil, and will 
not see it ; not faith, which may live in its per- 
petual presence, and survive its keenest torture. 
Any one who suffered any sorrow beyond the 
ordinary disappointments of life, was shunned 
by them as hated of the Gods and the prey of 
the Erinnys. So Antigone stood almost alone 
in her ministry to the afflicted ^Edipus, and we 
find no consolation, no tender solace of pity, in 
their stories of anguish, and but little of human 
sympathy. Amidst the clashing of Olympic 
chariot wheels, and the excitement of wars with 
the Persians, the Grecian youth might have said 
with Philip von Artevelde, 

" We have no time to mourn." 

although the wise thoughtfulness of the friar's 
answer would have been very far from his heart. 

" He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend, 
Eternity mourns that." 



94 IDEAL LIFE. 

This deeper element of sorrow, which, under 
the name of contrition, has so large a place in 
our worship, is wholly absent from theirs, which 
is almost a revelry of sacred dances and alternate 
songs. The passion of love with them was 
always closely united with sensuous beauty and 
youth ; and neither infancy nor old age — so 
touching in their very helplessness that they 
kindle our tenderest feelings into life — are often 
brought before our minds by their literature or 
their art. These dwell upon the thoughts of 
vigor, intellect and beauty, earthly skill and 
achievement, as completing the full round of a 
happy life. Their poets are " singers"; their 
heroes go into conflict with jest and laughter. 
In the flush of youthful power, which is charac- 
teristic of this race, all things which they desire 
seem not only possible, but easy of attainment, 
and in illustration you may see the incredible 
exploits and tasks they assign to their mythic 
heroes, Hercules, Jason, Theseus, Achilles. In 
reality they themselves displayed the most ex- 
traordinary intellectual facility and skill com- 
bined with great physical power; "the victor 
in the foot-race or wrestling-match might also 
win the prize for the ode or the trilogy ; the man 
who wrote the Medea, received the athlete's 
wreath at the Eleusinian games, and he who 
discovered the ratio of the hypothenuse was 
crowned for victory in boxing." 



THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 95 

A part of this was without doubt due to their 
method of instruction, which did not exalt the 
memory above the higher faculties, or extinguish 
the sense of firmness and enjoyment. Their 
schools of philosophy were those of the porch, 
the grove, the garden, as well as the lyceum 
and academy, and the very names of the first 
are redolent of the free, glad life out of doors. 
Their wise men uttered their thoughts in the 
golden sunshine or green shade to young men, 
whose eager eyes brightened as they listened, 
and whose voices rose in swift question or re- 
sponse, — to young men, who believed them- 
selves of heroic ancestry, and so pledged to all 
things great and noble. Each little island, or 
district, had indeed its local heroic family, as 
you remember, Ajax belonged to the ^Ecaidae, 
of the island of ^Egina, and the sixteen statues 
in the temple of Zeus there — afterwards restored 
by Thorwaldsen when carried to Germany — are 
supposed to represent the deeds and struggles 
of Ajax during the war with Troy. They kept 
ever in remembrance — visibly commemorated 
by some beautiful form of art — the great acts 
of their countrymen or ancestors; and they 
were themselves in their tranquil power and 
athletic grace, — their glad, quick movements as 
unrestrained as a little child's — their exquisite 
beauty of feature and color — the strongest 
proofs of their noble descent. 



g6 IDEAL LIFE. 

They were a fearless race, and he who would 
think true thoughts most also think bold ones ; 
— fearless, not only of the " barbarians, " as 
they haughtily termed the other races, but even 
of the more dread and mysterious forces of 
nature, which they perceived to be vital and full 
of movement. They represented these to 
themselves, when brought into contact with 
man, under the wonderful and pathetic myth 
of Demeter, and later, they symbolized wilder 
nature as the God Pan, with his Fauns, Satyrs, 
and Hamadryads; and either myth, — of the 
earth in its motherhood — or its riot and wild 
freedom — wore few aspects of terror to their 
dauntless outlook. They did not hesitate to 
level their shafts of irony at the Gods themselves, 
and question the justice of their traditional deal- 
ings with men. But with all their mocking wit, 
they were by nature artistic and poetic, and 
united to their fearless love of nature a twin 
passion for humanity, which inspired them with 
a noble earnestness and fire of thought in their 
higher moods. It is interesting to watch the 
interfusion of these two loves in all their con- 
ceptions. If one, young and fair, must die; 
slain, they say, by the special wrath or jealousy 
of some God, will he not return again in some 
blooming flower, or soaring bird? And with 
the bitter taste of the wild mint, they inter- 



THE GREEK tDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 97 

weave some story of human resentment, or find 
in the plaintive cry of the sea-mew, and the 
brooding calm of the halycon, some lingering 
trace of human sorrow or love ; as the Oriental 
saw in the wistful glance of his beast of burden 
some pitiful story of a brother in bondage. 

Both from their peculiar vitality of tempera- 
ment, and the manner in which they acquired 
knowledge, they became a race of speakers as 
well as thinkers. Oratory was not a distinct 
profession, requiring special training, for the 
language of a people so devoted to music and 
song, could not fail to grow soft, flexible and 
rythmical ; and the Greek child inherited skill 
in its use at its birth. The father told to chil- 
dren and grandchildren legends of the Gods, or 
stories of the noble and brave who fell in war. 
Shepherds recited songs at their rural games and 
feasts, or told with lively gestures, as they 
watched their flock, resting from the noon-day 
heat, some tale of Oread or Hamadryad, whose 
rustling footsteps they themselves perchance had 
heard ! We are told that Herodotus so recited 
his history at the Olympic festival that Thucy- 
dides, a boy of fifteen, was moved to tears. 
And when the dead, who had died in defense of 
their country, were brought back to rest in the 
last, silent slumber, the greatest of their states- 
men uttered their sad eulogium. 

9 






98 IDEAL LIFE. 

. But simple narrations could not long content 
hearers, whose nerves thrilled and pulses beat 
with such quick, warm life. I think not even the 
recital of Homer, — although the eyes of the 
listening mothers must have been wet with tears 
at the sorrows of Andromache and Astyanax, 
and the wrath of Achilles was surely reflected 
in the knit and sullen brows of the men who 
heard; — not even Homer's could have fully 
sufficed them. For in their own thought, his- 
tory simulated life ; they saw every deed with 
the rapid movement of reality, with every 
changing phase of look, tone or gesture. They 
would have a story tangible and visible as well 
as audible, alive with motion, warm with color ; 
and from these vivid conceptions and intense 
emotions flowered forth the drama, which was 
at once the blossom and crown of Ionian culture. 
With the characteristic audacity of this bold 
race, they placed their theatres ' * with the sky 
above, and the sea before their seats," and 
dared to stand face to face with nature, un- 
dwarfed by her magnitude, and unabashed. It 
took great thoughts to keep time worthily with 
the mighty rythms of wind and wave. You 
must imagine-— if you would transport yourself 
back to that day — a great multitude assembled 
to hear these, row after row of breathless faces. 
When the spell is broken they will pour through 



THE GREEK, IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 99 

the streets, a seething, tumultuous crowd, noisy 
again with repartee and laughter. But now ! 
you see them with heads slightly bent forward, 
lips half apart, eager eyes fixed on the stage, as 
silent and motionless as one great listener. The 
personal magnetism is so strong that every feel- 
ing which stirred the poets' words, sweeps also 
these flexible and mobile lineaments that brighten 
or darken at a tone. In such an audience — and 
in no other — was it possible that the rough and 
ignorant murderers of Ibycus, feeling a sudden 
shadow darken the air, and seeing the cranes 
flying overhead with harsh notes, should cry 
out, "See there! See there! the cranes of 
Ibycus!" and so convicted themselves of the 
murder of the lonely traveler on the mountain 
path, where only these winged creatures were 
witnesses.* 

In the whole of modern history only one 
period resembles the spirit of Ionian Greece in 
its spirit and vitality, — the period of Sydney 
and Shakspeare and Spenser. When a subject 
of England refused a crown because his first 
title was the noblest, and the author of the fair, 

*Note on the story of Ibycus. — Demeter might be sup- 
posed, after her long and sorrowful journey, seeking for her 
lost child, to look with peculiar favor and compassion upon 
travelers, therefore the discovery of the murderers of Ibycus 
by the cranes, birds which were sacred to her. One myth 
thus strikes a tangled net-work of fine roots through all Greek 
art and literature. 



IOO IDEAL LIFE. 

quaint romance of Arcadia died the hero of 
Zutphen, — when a vast country of untrodden 
land was added to the little kingdom of islands, 
and the fancies of men bloomed into rare 
masques and sweetest madrigals. It was then 
the English drama reached its culmination. Its 
revival is impossible unless we could bring back 
the conditions of the Elizabethian age, or the 
social atmosphere of Athens, in which this in- 
tense mental activity so ran the great circle of 
life, that men not only thought fair thoughts as 
they drew breath, but thought deepened into 
feeling, and feeling quickened into action and 
form. 






THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. 10 1 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. 



"Our life was but a battle and a march." — Schiller. 

tGAIN we enter a new world. The harmony 
-^ and symmetry of the more limited Greek 
life disappears and we find everywhere antago- 
nism and conflict. The nature which surrounds 
these men of the north country is cold, bare, 
unfriendly ; the earth will not yield her harvests 
without the hard labor of human hands; the sea 
would soon chill to death the boldest swimmer 
who should trust himself to its dark waves. The 
whistling winds blow shrilly through the fir-woods, 
snows and storms obscure the air, and the sum- 
mer is a swift dream "between a sleep and a 
sleep," full of sweetness, but soon gone. The 
conditions of existence here, are endurance, 
energy and courage ; not without toil is the fire- 



102 • IDEAL LIFE. 

wood procured for winter, or the harvests 
gathered into barns ; and the chase is for use 
as well as pleasure, for the skins of wild beasts 
serve as covering and their flesh as meat. 

The marks of such earnest lives are impressed 
upon the Scandinavian myths, — of Odin, pacing 
along with the dark ravens, Thought and Re- 
membrance, beside him, — Thor, with his mighty 
hammer, — the sorrow of earth and heaven at 
the death of Balder, who was the shadow type 
of Christ. The idea of antagonism between 
distinct elements, —warring powers of good and 
evil — pervades this strong, sad runic lore. It 
is an earnest race which receives it, which after- 
wards sets the mark of its earnest thought on 
all it does, so that even its grotesque designs 
are full of seriousness and grave suggestion. 
Such are the Knight and Death, and The Dance 
of Death, by Diirer and Holbein, and such a 
spirit inspires the quaint and profuse decoration 
of gothic architecture. It is more interior, it 
has more and deeper life than the races which 
foreran it. When the Hebrew bows himself, 
"earth to the earth," in those strong words 
which our translation does not approach, it is to 
escape exterior penalties, — poverty, disease, 
worst of all, exile; the Greek, with all his 
hopefulness in outward adversity, shrinks with 
horror from the sorrow of the soul, the remorse 



THE GEIixM^NIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I03 

for sin, which his light nature so ill compre- 
hends that he deems it a mark of the wrath of 
the Gods; but the Germanic mind perceives 
suffering, not as a mere punishment, but as an 
inherent element of higher development; "a 
baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new 
state. The yearning memories, the bitter regret, 
the agonized sympathy, the struggling appeals 
to the Invisible Right, * * can do the work 
of years, so that one may come out from such 
great anguish with a soul full of new awe and 
pity." Into the Northern Valhalla entered only 
the souls of heroes slain in conflict, and when 
this contest and pain came within, the strange 
element of spiritual life was awakened. Here 
lies the impassable line which separates our 
emotions, our thoughts, our characters from the 
past. There is no race more external than the 
Shemitic tribes apart from the spirit of inspira- 
tion ; beautiful as are Greek art, culture and 
power, it is the beauty only of man's natural 
life, but Christianity kindled again the spiritual 
nature. Even in the old sagas there seemed 
to be a foreshadowing of the sorrowful, passion- 
ate, earnest side of christian faith, so that the 
Germanic races readily laid down their old pagan 
idolatries for the acknowledgment of the christ- 
hood of God. And the Germanic races have 
become the especial exponent and representative 



104 IDEAL LIFE. 

of christian and spiritual thought, as the southern 
races of Europe have of the forms and emotional 
life of the christian faith. 

This spirituality then, which was born of the 
spirit of Christ, characterizes our new civiliza- 
tion, forms the boundary line between the new 
and the old. On the one side lies the youth, on 
the other the adult age, of humanity. The new 
nature seeks, not happiness, but purification 
from unclean and base desires, as its end. Every 
circumstance of northern life, — its struggle and 
limitations — the isolation of many lives — even 
the long, dark winters of its rigorous climate — 
was well filled to foster a deeper morality, a 
more interior development of soul. It is so 
easy to brood over old days and the wounds 
that ache still, to nourish our aspirations and our 
dreams, in the silence of the cold outer world, 
where the fall of snow hushes even a passing 
footstep, and all of life seems to burn within. 
In the loneliness the soul rises up as its own 
judge and accuser, and thought after thought, 
desire after desire, appear and disappear before 
this secret and mysterious tribunal. Thus the 
recognition of human responsibility, the know- 
ledge of the subtle movements of the will, grow 
in strength and light. The Oriental mind, with 
its states of vision and seership on the heavenly 
side, and its horrible obsessions on the other, 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT. OF CONFLICT. 10$ 

never seems wholly to attain freedom. " Hath 
not the potter power over the clay?" From the 
smooth tongue of the Greek comes the story. of 
men beguiled by the Gods, not knowing what 
they do, as ^Edipus ; or you are told with ready 
excuse of the Chamber of Fate, . 

"Where the three blind old women sit spinning the world." 

The Germanic mind alone sees man as master 
of his fate, and knows that the snare about hi 
feet is woven by his act and will. In Goethe's 
great work, Faust deliberately chooses between 
life and death with open eyes. He is not blinded 
by Mephistopheles, he is free to summon or re~ 
ject him. In the four supreme tragedies of the 
Anglo-Saxon mind, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, 
Macbeth, we see passion brooding, quickening 
into life, wavering to and fro in the still possible 
choice, and at the last, of its own will, plunging 
forward to the dark end. Always is the con- 
quest possible at the beginning, although it may 
be attained only through contest and pain. 
Hamlet and Macbeth, standing on the brink of 
unseen worlds, and called by unearthly voices, 
still recognize the freedom of their wills. To 
such souls belong fearful combats between their 
lower and higher natures in the hour of tempta- 
tion, but a deep strength is theirs, which enables 
them to endure to the end. After the throes 

10 



106 IDEAL LIFE. 

of self-abnegation, a new peace is born — a 
higher life — and they see the " new heavens " 
arise above them. 

Germanic civilization is not only more interior, 
but also more complex than the old, because it 
bears the impress of the fore-running ages. The 
thoughts of Sanscrit lore send many a thread-like 
and hidden vein through our philosophy and 
language, and in our modern literature its He- 
braisms lie side by side with the distinct, straight 
conceptions of the Greek. While this wonder- 
ful complexity nourishes a richer individuality 
in the noble mind, it has acted unfavorably on 
all arts which express character by color and 
form, for characteristic figures and groups are 
found chiefly where the conditions of life are 
simple, and classes distinct. Music is more pe- 
culiarly the subtle interpreter through its own 
sweetness and pain, of our restless aspirations, 
our sorrows and faith. It has developed into a 
great art through the modern spirit, of which its 
own spirituality, its interwoven harmonies of 
two elements, its infinite longings partake. 
Perfection of form culminated in Athens, and 
richness of color in the strange and dream-like 
Venetian City, but the fullest wonders of tone 
and harmony, of rich chords and varying melody 
have been unfolded to the Germanic mind. — 
Because the innermost life of music vibrates with 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. IO7 

our own yearnings and is full of the breath of 
our life, it flows into our souls with sayings 
which no words can fathom. 

The restlessness and conflict of our civilization 
affect every individual life. * The nerves quiver 
with the flash of telegrams along the vibrating 
wires, and upon the sensitive brain presses the 
confusion of our multiform toil, and the hurry- 
ing excitement of our overcrowded cities. — 
While we have learned so many things, have we 
not forgotten one art — of enjoyment? In the 
onward rush of our full, swift days, we often 
miss utterly the lovely, unconscious growth 
which needs rest and room and quiet. 

How different from the old life ! Then a man 
was born with the unmixed blood of one race 
in his veins, belonged to a fixed class, inherited 
his handicraft from father and grandsire. His 
memories and impressions were formed by 
the sights and sounds surrounding his little ham- 
let — the great castle in the distance, the birds 
wheeling about its turrets at sunset, the dawn, 
creeping up over the dark and moist fields, the 
bells ringing for vespers or angelus, the sound 
of greetings in his own tongue at market-place 
or fair. His neighbors were akin to him in 
spirit and blood, sharing the same faith and 
local superstitions, following the same standard 
into battle through generations, and relating 



108 IDEAL LIFE, 

kindred legends of hero and saint. His garb 
told his history and position — as the black gown 
marked the friar, and the coat of mail the war- 
rior. His life was woven of one substance and 
pattern throughout,' and equally of one fabric 
were the lives above and below him. Here the 
artist who delights in the color of life finds his 
richest field, and the picturesque side of art be- 
gins — where in one long procession pass peas- 
ants and armed men, fair women and humble 
servitors, priests and traders, the pomp of princes 
and the beggar in tatters side by side — each life 
written in marked and visible characters. 

We may see the change now in the faces 
around us. The very type of feature is altered, 
and instead of the straight outlines, the single 
expression, the repose of the Greek face ; in- 
stead of the strength and grave stateliness of 
the Elizabethean era, we see countenances which 
are baffling, contradictory, troubled. Every- 
where you find these, stamped with the many- 
sided and changing spirit of the age. Their 
lines are deciphered with difficulty, for each 
subtle emotion or thought which passes is com- 
pounded of many elements, folded one after an- 
other with the recesses of consciousness. Rob- 
ert Browning's poetic studies are extremely 
characteristic of this multiform and nervous na- 
ture. In his "Book and the Ring" you will 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I O9 



remark that where he gives you one act, he 
gives you a thousand motives and influences. 
Indeed, I believe we have a life which the an- 
cients did not possess, and could not compre- 
hend. All our emotions are complex ; the 
minor notes pierce through our gayest music, a 
strange ecstasy lifts up our pains and anguish, 
It is like the garden and its revellers in the pic- 
ture of Venice, when the viol hushes 

" And the brown faces cease to sing, 
Sad with the whole of pleasure." 

With but few exceptions the garb and external 
life of this age are monotonous and character- 
less. It is from the face alone that you learn 
man's history, and then it is the ever-changing 
vitality of the profound spiritual life, rather than 
fixed event or station — what he is, rather than 
what he does — a study of character from George 
Eliot, rather than the old romance-story of ad- 
venture and rescue — which you see before you 
in the groups you pass, the men or women you 
meet. We no longer enter life in dramatic 
fashion, as hero and heroine, courtiers, soldiers, 
attendants, name and part assigned. Each in 
his turn is centre in his world of life, and again 
ministers to another, but in ever-varying rela- 
tions and phases of mood. And with this 



110 IDEAL LIFE. 

change in our apprehension of life have followed 
changes in the form and spirits of our arts and 
literature. 

Our greatest writers teem with characters, 
motley and diverse figures, laughing, reasoning, 
loving, hating, pressing towards the light. See 
how crowded is the story of " Faust " — a chorus 
of mighty spirits, the earth-story with the cold 
and mocking tempter, the dreaming Faust, the 
passionate and pathetic character of Margaret, 
the garrulous Martha, — and then the wonderful 
Walpurgis — night on the Herz Mountains, — 
the world of wierd sprites and gnomes, — the 
"eerie forge of the dwarf people," in the second 
part, the song of the Fauns, dancing with oaken 
crown on crispy hair, of the Sirens and of Ariel. 

" Horchet ! horchet! dem sturm der Hosen. " 

strike flashing scintillating images of fiery power 
and light across your mind in rapid, vibrating 
succession. And even behind these dazzling and 
ineffaceable figures and tones of harmony, lies 
another world, yet — of nature, the old woods, 
"where bough crooks out from bough in stub- 
born state, "<the murmuring of the brooks, or 
their onward rush — "Bach zu Bachen " — the 
summit glow on the old chapel, and that lovely 
glimpse of peace and quiet, where — 

" In waves of silver, drifting 
On to harvest, rolls the corn." 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. Ill 

t 

The characteristic mind of the Anglo-Saxon 
race is Shakspeare. Each character of his is 
complex, with the imprint, wonderfully compli- 
cated, which inheritance, temperament, educa- 
tion, calling, the age, society, conversation, 
habits have stamped on every man, — an incom- 
municable and individual imprint, which once 
stamped in a man, is not found in any other. — 
Behind one word he conceals a picture, an atti- 
tude, a long argument abridged, a mass of 
swarming ideas. From amidst his complex con- 
ceptions, and colored semi-vision, he grasps a 
fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it; it is 
for you, from this fragment to divine the rest. 
He weaves plot within plot; " Hamlet" and 
' 'Taming the Shrew, " and ' ' Midsummer Night's 
Dream," contain a play within a play. In the 
last, slight as is its texture, he draws three 
worlds; the noble Theseus with his Amazon 
bride, and the misled and ardent lovers in the 
May-wood, are as distinct from the gross Athe- 
nian workmen with their simple vanities, as the 
aerial fairy brood which haunt the thymy banks 
and blooming thickets. The Arcadian story of 
Perdita and Florizel in the n Winter Tale " is a 
complete romance apart from the statelier mea- 
sure of the noble Hermione's history. All his 
fools and clowns are depicted with the careful 
and characteristic detail of the Flemish artist. 



112 IDEAL LIFE. 

Scarcely does a figure cross his stage without 
our learning something of his life, habits, am- 
bitions, and even ancestry. He paints for you 
at one stroke, the past, future, and present en- 
vironnage ; and you gain the outlook and insight 
of vision at once. 

Totally unlike this was the work of the Greek 
artist. In architecture, he conceived a regular 
Temple, pure, chaste, well-balanced, — in sculp- 
ture, a symmetrical group of two or three, 
rarely more, " a young, upright man raising an 
arm" — in drama, " a wounded warrior who will 
not return to camp, though they beseech him." 
The minor characters are intentionally denuded 
of individuality to heighten the central concep- 
tion, which stands clear-cut as a head in cameo. 
This is the meaning of the Greek choruses, of 
those indistinct figures in the background, who 
do not interfere with the single, isolated image, 
which at one flash is imprinted upon your re- 
membrance. 

We cannot measure more definitely the great 
chasm which divides the two types of character 
than by looking at the different interpretations 
of the old-world stories, which both races have 
loved. For instance, the tale of Alcestis. The 
Greek has told you in glad colors and simple 
outlines, so far as he could — of the life of King 
Admetus in Thessaly, of his strange herdsman 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I I 3 

on the banks of the Amphrysus, and the beau- 
tiful Alcestis, who gave up her life for her hus- 
band's. This is the end for the Greek, but to 
the Germanic mind it is the beginning", for our 
life takes up the thread of theirs and continues 
it. Here we wonder and muse — did Alcestis 
indeed die? — what thoughts were hers in that 
last strange hour ? — what memories of old 
springs, when the wild blossoms were white 
around her father's house ? — what insight into 
the worthlessness- of human desires ? — what 
vision of coming light? — what still, white peace ? 
And so Admetus lived ! But what came after- 
wards ? The shameful, low life, empty of honor 
and love, — the vacant days without the quiet 
presence in the rooms, — he seeks to bring all 
these with their accompanying emotions and 
images before his mind. The Greek gives only 
what he can see, or hear ; the anger which 
flushes the cheek, the love that shines in the 
eye ; but the Northern mind lays bare the 
quivering fibres of the soul, the sudden pang, 
the swift, pathetic remembrance, the twisted 
web of feeling and intellect and image. 

Or read the story of Cupid and Psyche, so 
wonderfully lovely and fresh and sweet. The 
Greek tells you of the union of the two lovers. 
Without doubt higher minds, educated partly 
under the mystical influences from the East, 



I 14 IDEAL LIFE. 

saw a higher meaning in the myth ; but to the 
common crowd of the Greeks the story only 
tells how 

"Satyrus 
Did blow his pipes ; Pan touched his reed — and so 
At last were Cupid and Psyche married." 

{Metamorph Lib. VI.) 

And the tale ends joyfully, as if with a glad 
tinkling of cymbals. But the wistful German 
heart lingers still over the old fable. Where all 
is so sweet, is there no more behind ? In the 
story of the poor wandering Psyche, the soul, 
he reads somewhat of his own life and longings. 
Like his own youth she arises before him, as 

" Looking o'er the lands 
She stood with straining eyes and clasped hands." 

or when 

" Like a thin dream she passed the chattering town, 
And on the thronged quays watched the ships come in, 
Patient, amid the strange, outlandish din." 

Even so we are always watching, yearning, 
seeking an invisible good, in a world that is 
soon estranged from us, and forgetful of our 
presence. And when so weary with hard tasks, 
foot-sore with rough journeyings, full of discour- 
aged fears, she falls asleep, all her work still 
undone, and the cruel punishment waiting for 
her awakening, then lo ! 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I 1 5 

5 ' This Love put his hand out in a dream, 
And straight out stretches all things." 

— is not this the great work which love desires 
to do for all souls ? This meaning throws its 
roots deep into the essential nature of our in- 
complete and aching lives, made whole and 
sound only by the Highest Love, which is most 
near us when we know it not. 

Even our own love far outreaches our actions 
or our intellect. Repeat but once more the 
beautiful line I have just quoted, and think how 
true it has been with the three races whom I 
have chosen as representative. "This Love 
just puts his hand out in a dream," and so 
the three ideal characters, Joseph, Hector 
and King Arthur of the round table, the im- 
aginary hero and king, and the young shep- 
herd of the east, strike at once as with a flash 
of light the goal towards which our centuries, 
with all their added growth, but slowly move. 
In a barbarous age, and born of a barbarous 
race, each exhibits the most consummate results 
of christian culture ; amidst the alien elements 
of his very household, each stands 

" Like a conscience amidst the warning senses," 

and each, the Trojan, with his inherited in- 
stincts of pride and scorn ; the Hebrew, born of 



I 1 6 IDEAL LTFE. 

a revengeful and perfidous race ; the Briton, 
who rules a half savage people, moves among 
secret and open foes with a spirit of tenderness, 
forbearance and forgiveness which fills the dark 
places of their ages with strange light. You 
will think I am strangely confusing the poetic 
and historic sources of knowledge in placing 
these three together, but even as the soul parts 
from the body, so the ideal portion of a historic 
character is at least distinguished from the ma- 
terial and veritable man of flesh and blood. 
They become at last such influences as these 
poetic conceptions which we call purely ideal. 
They become great thoughts, august virtues, 
images of a heavenly life, and we forget that 
they too knew the weariness and the littleness 
of our earth in their days that are past, if this 
far-reaching love illumines them. The charac- 
ters of intellect and action are soon superseded 
and distanced by further developments, and only 
the ideals of love remain the same. 

No great thought that has ever been quick- 
ened with action into love can be lost, whether 
it has been embodied in the life of a man who 
dies, or a race, whose glory perishes. The dead 
''hold in mortmain all their old estate," for on 
their side lies reality and completion ; theirs, I 
conceive, are the only whole and consummate 
existences. The great law of the continuity of 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I I J 



life is strikingly shown in the history of modern 
thought, of the influences of the Hebraic spirit 
and its germinative processes, and of another 
period of conception and birth, no less marked, 
in the renaissance of the fifteenth century, when 
Greek letters, Greek philosophy and Greek art 
came in contact with modern races. The artis- 
tic side of the renaissance in Italy really dates 
from the thirteenth century when a bas-relief, 
the chase of Meleager, was brought from Greece 
in a Pisan galley and placed in the Campo Santo 
where Nicolo Pisano saw it, and studied with 
such wonder and delight its marvels of grace 
and beautiful form that he leaves for it all the 
teachings of the Byzantine school. From this 
simple beginning Art springs up with fresh vital- 
ity, and adding to its rich gift of color the classic 
grace of form it blooms into the fecund ages of 
Giotto, Raphael, Angelo, Da Vinci, Bellini, 
Giorgione Titian, putting forth shining flowers 
that have thrown their light and fragrance far 
over the seething and troubled waves of our 
civilization. 

Cut without the deeper significance, the spiri- 
tual vitality, the purer faith of Christianity, no 
such work would have been possible. Especi- 
ally does Michael Angelo, however imbued with 
classic thought in the beginning of his career, 
show in his greatest works, the fire, the earnest- 



Il8 IDEAL LIFE. 

ness, the depth of this new life. In Germany 
the result of the revival of Greek letters was 
philosophic rather than asthetic, and we see a 
quickening and freedom in German thoughts 
and writings but no change in the character of 
these. Still does the line between the interior 
and exterior, the spiritual and natural lives run 
distinct and broad. 

The enjoyment of nature in the two races is 
strikingly different. With the Greek there is 
but little perception of color, of varying light, 
and shade, but a quick delight in form, motion, 
sound, all that speaks of life in nature, an in- 
tense rapture that clothes this perception of 
life with personality and visible shape, and sees 
these images of his own fancy rejoicing, piping, 
dancing, mating together, leading such joyous 
lives as he beholds in all wild sylvan creatures. 
But the mind that is touched with the christian 
light rises higher, and sees in nature an image 
of its spiritual life, knows in her its own moods 
of light and joy, of darkness and storm. Hence 
it is that we so specially delight in the more 
complex, the more subtle and fleeting enjoy- 
ment of color, the rich after-glow of the vanished 
sun, the dark shadows of fir-woods, the thou- 
sand tints and lights and flying shades on the 
water, or on the rolling grain, the soft, rich 
hues of autumn days ; color set to color in con- 



THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I 1 9 

trast or harmony like full chords and sweet 
melodies of music. There is some suggestion 
of humanity to us in each of these, of its inner 
life ; there is fire and passion in the violet and 
gold, peace and rest in the cool green shadows 
and far blue lights, a melancholy in the brood- 
ing storm, unsatisfied desire in the \\ ailing wind. 
So the Christian mind, the Germanic thought, 
found exquisite hope and joy in the spring, a 
symbol of its highest faith — the resurrection of 
the soul — in its Easter days when light strug- 
gled against cold and darkness in the ceaseless 
conflict of two elements, and the light conquer- 
ed, and tender flowers sprang up from the 
shadowy under-world, and the empty chrysalis, 
the broken egg-shell spoke of life that had risen 
higher. Everywhere in the old German verses, 
in the earlier Anglo-Saxon poets, you find this 
rapture at the returning breath of spring — the 
bloom of a new paradise — the May of life. But 
even as we see the image of the soul in the 
lower world of nature, we behold it farther off, 
a world apart, not interfused with humanity as 
it seemed in the day of the joyous Greeks. 

From the life of the strong Greek hero who 
overcame his foes, who loved his friends, who 
rejoiced in warmth and summer light, in the 
good comradeship of green hills and the river's 
voice at sultry noon, who did not fear Olympus 



120 IDEAL LIFE. 

greatly, being also a "son of the Gods," we 
come into a far different world. The christian 
nature is not einfach — one-fold ; the young 
knight sins and suffers and repents, he fasts and 
watches and rides forth on long and lonely 
quests, cheered by a vision, and seeking ever an 
ideal good. His own enemies he must forgive, 
and be very pitiful to all weak and tender crea- 
tures, to old age and infirmity. In battle he 
does not conquer by his strong arm, 

" His strength is as the strength often, 
Because his heart is pure." 

His life is not so bright that he should love only 
light and summer and joyous creatures ; he sees 
also a significance in lonely and dark places, 
and shadows over which the dawn breaks. 
There is ever a struggle in his own heart as in 
the world about him ; angels and demons, low 
desires and great loves war within him and 
without him, and there is no reast but death. 
Standing between two worlds, the known and 
the unknown, he knows darker fears, more in- 
effable dreams, and life is to him a shadow in 
the light of eternity. 



IDEAL FQJR.MS OF GOVERNMENT. 121 



CHAPTER V. 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 



felNGSLEY ends his romance of " Hypatia '' 
$s very beautifully by saying that all the 
races, the Goth, the Greek, the Hebrew, live 
still in our lives ; their ruling ideas, their char- 
acteristic loves are not extinct, but are found 
yet in the mixed element of our society and age. 
Each man indeed in his youth and boyhood 
knows the wild freedom and gaiety of the natural 
life ; as he grows older he enters into the region 
of doubt and temptation and sorrow and earnest 
work, and if his life has been faithful to his per- 
ceptions of virtue, he comes into the last years 
when one waits and prays and rests from labor, 
with a heart as child-like as those of the earlier 
and simpler races of our earth. In his own life 
is the journey, the feast, the battle, and after- 
ward the rest. 

But if a man journeys, it is towards human 
faces which will welcome him with greetings of 



122 IDEAL LIFE. 

smiles and eager looks ; it is with his friends that 
he rejoices at the festival ; and even in combat 
it is for others that he fights. Man is not 
wholly man save by his relations to others, and 
these relations organized into form constitute 
governments. The same vital and ideal spirit 
which pervades all individual intercourse from 
the highest to the lowest exists here also, and 
the true statesman sees the ideal of his country 
before him as the poet and the artist see their arts. 

All organizations possess one thought which 
is central and dominant, and which molds into 
its own image and likeness whatever is brought 
into contact with its working. So wherever 
monarchy is the genuine choice of a people, the 
true results of its thoughts and feelings, the so- 
cial and domestic relations, the morality, litera- 
ture and art will differ widely from those of a 
country whose intellectual action is best express- 
ed by a republic. 

In the monarchic ideal the first element is 
that of leadership, or personal greatness, which 
is afterwards changed by traditions of heroic 
ancestry into hereditary rights and the nobility 
of blood. The second is continuity, or inheri- 
tance, by which the first idea of leadership is 
conveyed in a permanent form through the sup- 
posed continuous transmission of inherited vir- 
tues and powers. The third element is perma- 



IDEAL F<i>RMS OF GOVERNMENT. 123 

nence, admitting no reactive force, so that 
authority is absolute, and action against it, 
rebellion ; and from this thought, leavening the 
whole man, proceed fixed social grades, military 
discipline, the monarchic organization. But it 
is impossible for this monarchic ideal to attain 
full realization. Even if such leaders as the 
mythic kings of the old legends were given in 
the beginning, their sons might turn aside to 
false gods ; and other and alien blood, and lower 
traits might be inherited at every remove, until 
their descendants on the very ground of trans- 
mission would be unfit to claim allegiance. Also 
the law of growth perpetually develops new 
forces, so that a government of absolute au- 
thority has the new powers of the printing 
press, telegraph and railroad, new activities ot 
mind, and opportunities for organization and 
union, to contend against to-day, in addition to 
the old antagonistic forces. The principle of 
limitation causes a large monarchy to be steadily 
opposed by smaller kingdoms allied together, or 
another monarchy equal in size and power. 
This produces a " balance of power," which is 
republican in spirit. 

The monarchic influence must be regarded as 
two-fold in power ; first, its wholly spiritual in- 
fluence over the individual minds who love and 
revere this ideal ; secondly, the actual working 



124 IDEAL LIFE. 

of the imperfectly realized organization on 
masses. Both of these, acting in unison, will 
permeate the whole of society with the same 
thought. As the king is obeyed by his king- 
dom, so are his governors by their provinces, 
and his generals by their armies. So also are 
the lords by their vassals, and a father by his 
household. Every separate atom of the crystal 
repeats its form. From the continual exercise 
of this power, springs the reverence and filial 
obedience, which are given either in form or 
reality, as the rule is just or unjust. From this 
also do the social forms of a monarchic court 
proceed, a gracious courtesy on the one hand, 
and on the other, deference and graceful regard. 
The agreeable and delightful side of life is con- 
tinually presented, and we see the quaint dignity 
and grace of the Court dances. Watteau festi- 
vals with elaborate costumes and attitudes. 
Vandyke Portraits, compliments and ceremonial. 
All these outward forms are beautiful or insipid, 
as they express true feeling, or the opposite. 
After a long interval of time, when one looks 
back to such a society, it appears like a bloom- 
ing garden full of gracious and stately figures, 
who engage in the slow dances, or in smiling 
converse, but when one is actually in the midst 
of such scenes, he perceives much weariness and 
formality. 



IDEAL FQRMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 25 

If we leave this shining surface, and penetrate 
farther down among the lower and ruder classes, 
we will find by strange contrasts, that the heroic 
ideal of those is, in its simpler form, merely an 
expression of strength. The hero of the "folk- 
songs " is a gallant leader in battle, a strong ruler 
of men, a soldier who dies bravely. Their ballads, 
as those of the Cid, the Douglass, and the 
Percy, delight in the rude details of battle, and 
the hand-to-hand conflict. ' But where the moral 
atmosphere is higher, and the range of thought 
broader, the sensibility is no longer satisfied 
with this grosser characteristic, but requires 
strength rightly and tenderly used, under the 
names of generosity and magnanimity. Where 
these form the heroic ideal, the ballads ripen 
into the grander forms of the epic and the tra- 
gedy. The Scandinavian songs grow into the 
"Eddas," the Skaldic songs into the Icelandic 
Sagas. As the "Iliad" is the slow crystaliza- 
tion of floating Greek traditions and poetry into 
a grand whole, so is the stirring epic of the 
"Niebelungenlied " of the German folk-lore, and 
romance. The stories of "King Lear" and the 
" Merchant of Venice " are found in earlier 
ballads, and the tragedies of yEschylus come, 
by his own avowal, from the materials of Homer. 
The same root thought, — growing, broadening, 
blossoming into more perfect harmony and sym- 
metry of form — is common to both. 



126 IDEAL LIFE. 

The virtues which respond to this ideal, are 
faith, loyalty, gratitude, patience, and fidelity. 
For the monarchic sentiment is like the feminine 
mind in its character ; this either looks up to 
the husband who is stronger, or down to the 
child that is weaker, and does not often move 
on the plane of equality and friendship ; and so 
chivalry, which is the flowering of this form of 
government, has much to say of generous deeds 
done for the weak -and helpless, and of their 
gratitude, but dwells little on reciprocal aid and 
mutual work. A group of peasants of La 
Vendee will best illustrate the character of a 
people permeated by this thought as its best. 
They will be a simple, kindly, honest race, of 
little learning, but delighting in legends of saints 
and their heavenly guardianship, and in tradi- 
tions of the heroes of their own land ; and by 
these, in the passionate fervor of a crisis, their 
own spirits will kindle, and flash to unexpected 
heights of valor and self-abnegation. 

All the arts of a kingdom are more or less 
colored by the monarchic feeling. Architecture, 
influenced by this, will give us the fortress, the 
palace, and the cathedral. The first expresses 
strength ; the second, with its long vistas of 
splendid rooms, repeated on every side by large 
mirrors, — its rows of marble pillars, whereby 
each part of the building echoes the other, — its 



IDEAL FpRMS OF GOVERNMENT. 1 27 

wide and lengthening halls, and winding laby- 
rinths of stately pleasure grounds, seems to 
dwell upon the thought of continuity in endless 
succession, while the lofty summit and wide- 
extended wings express the ideas of eminence 
and protection. The cathedral utters in form 
the thought of permanence ; and the elements 
of veneration and endurance without change 
impart a deep sentiment of awe to the beholder. 
With its rising dome and cross-surmounted 
spires, it cleaves the sky, and with long-drawn 
aisles and echoing transepts, it leads to the altar, 
suffused with the rich-colored light from the 
pictured windows, and adorned with marble 
forms of Deity or Saint. In every part rests the 
expression of serene and immutable repose. 
You see the worshippers kneeling, and remem- 
ber that through long successive years, genera- 
tion after generation have knelt here to adore, 
and have arisen, going their way to dust that 
ends all to the earthly vision. But there is no 
flaw in the white marble, the colors are no shade 
less lustrous as they fall on the ashes of the 
dead ; the sunshine still creeps forward upon 
this silent dial of time. 

The melodies which float to us from this 
realm of thought, are emotional in their charac- 
ter. The choiring voices pour out the full tide 
of rapture or agony from the adoring souls, and 



123 IDEAL LIFE. 

find perfect utterance to its worship in the an- 
guish-stricken strains of Jacopone De Todi, the 
celestial masses of Mozart, the solemn chants 
and jubilant chorals of the Catholic Church. 
Or as we return to the world we hear the ravish- 
ing and light sweetness of the Italian schools, 
— all the soft southern melody that allures, car- 
resses and floats upon the surface of the soul — 
the music, of the loves and festivities of the court. 

Artists, whose imaginations have been kin- 
dled at this flame, give to our sight the rapture 
of adoring vision, altar-pieces, the Royal Virgin 
Mother and the Holy Child, Jesus, surrounded 
by the saints of the earth, St. Jerome, St. Se- 
bastian, St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and the "glori- 
ous hierarchy of heaven," angels rejoicing like 
Fra Angelico's in the serene blue skies, or 
choiring like Mantcgna's singers, or standing 
silently as Corregio's, with a white lily in the 
hand for the annunciation of the Royal birth. 

And in sculpture, mighty and majestic figures 
in marble, like the horned Moses of Michael 
Angelo, rise up with strange grace and dignity. 
They all hold a princely rank, and overawe us 
with their solemn and still brows, or smile down 
to us with gracious pity. But their silent pres- 
ence is not of us, or of our life. 

That intellectual philosophy which owns no 
authority but the truth ; and science, whose 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 2Q, 



progress is of itself a succession of revolutions 
overthrowing often time-honored hypotheses by 
one new discovery, thrive only in that limited 
and constitutional form of monarchy which is 
most accurately described as a ' 'veiled repub- 
lic. " The monarchial spirit of authority is not 
in consonance or sympathy with the principles 
of these ; and if science is ever protected by s 
despotic court, it is rather from the outward 
and material benefits which accrue from her tri- 
umphs over the physical world, than from a 
scientific spirit. 

The schools of science group themselves 
around the ideal republic as the elder schools of 
art around the monarchy. Indeed, as this new 
central influence acts upon the domain of 
thought and feeling, all things move into differ- 
ent positions and assume new stations. It is 
intellectual rather than emotional; it reveres 
law rather than miracle, conscience instead of 
authority, justice instead of grace ; in the place 
of war it develops commerce, and aspires to- 
wards the realization of the great human unity.* 
Its three elements, in contrast to leadership, 
permanence and continuity, are equality, move- 
ment and individuality. This equality is one 
of certain fundamental rights, which do not re- 
main the same but increase as the race is educa- 

*See Emilio Castelar's "Republican Movement." 
12 



I30 IDEAL LIFE. 

ted and developed, as an adult enters into new 
powers and possessions when the age of child- 
hood is over. It is an underlying basis to the 
inequalities and degrees of natural genius, virtue, 
strength and beauty by which we are distin- 
guished from one another, and also to the 
artificial grades of our complete modern society. 
A perfect level is not more possible than a 
vacuum, which nature abhors, and this equality 
does not conflict with grades and degrees, by 
which reciprocal aid is rendered throughout the 
whole body politic. It is simply the equal right 
of every individual and class to be governed for 
its own good, and not for the good of any other 
more privileged person or class. 

The element of movement is an essential part 
of the republican idea; and it holds law to a 
certain extent in a state of fusion to be moulded 
according to the new forms of events with their 
special exigencies. But this power of altering 
old laws, or framing new ones, must be regula- 
ted by fundamental principles in harmony with 
the central idea, must be limited in its use. 
There is no element of the ideal republic more 
frequently misinterpreted than this of change 
and progress. It is not expressed by the dis- 
orderly advance of a rabble, each man according 
to his own will and in his own time, but by the 
regular march of well-ordered masses, keeping 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 131 

step, and with unbroken ranks. It should be 
like the growth and development of a plant, 
whose embryo leaves pass into common leaves, 
these into bractea, the bractea into sepals, the 
sepals into flowering petals, which in their turn 
are transformed into stamens, anthers and ova- 
ries that ripen into the seed-bearing fruit, so that 
by fine degrees the whole plant attains perfec- 
tion, growing from seed to seed. The good 
existing in the old state is not to be destroyed, 
but revived in new forms suited to new needs. 
Violent disruptions are no essential part of the 
republican idea — which some seem to mistake 
for the revolutionary process — but belong to a 
state of transition where there is no stable gov- 
ernment, and are more apt to be succeeded by 
absolute military authority than by orderly civil 
law. 

The ideal republic is as impossible of perfect 
realization as the ideal kingdom ; and the reason 
is very clear — so long as men are imperfect, the 
government which expresses their will must also 
be imperfect. By action rather than theory, 
we have learned that the influence of that govern- 
ment is best, which blends in itself the two ideas, 
as in a constitutional monarchy, or an orderly 
republic, and which most fully develops good 
men and restrains evil, or — since men cannot 
be divided into distinct classes of good and evil, 



132 • IDEAL LIFE. 

but are of mixed quality — which most perfectly 
develops humanity and represses the brute in 
them. The present system of law, in awarding 
death to a criminal, does not debar from him 
any mitigation which humanity could ask. In 
man's moral as well as mental nature, authority 
and freedom are found side by side, correlative 
rather than antagonistic, and without both 
humanity can have no perfect growth. They 
are as necessary to each other as the masculine 
and feminine, the emotional and intellectual 
principles, and are found in beautiful relation in 
every wise government. Without the invisible 
power of law, which defines our rights, authori- 
ty becomes oppression ; without visible authority 
law is impotent. In the natural order of the 
household the mild monarchy of the father 
and mother is followed by the independence of 
adult age, each fostering and strengthening the 
other. 

I have said that the republican ideal is in- 
tellectual in spirit, and its chief danger lies in its 
tendency to neglect the moral truths of love for 
mere subtlety of knowledge. By the very 
nature of a republic, intellect may secure its 
highest grade, and there is apt to be a predomi- 
nance of mental training. A serious injury is 
inflicted upon a nation when technical skill and 
superficial brilliancy displace the sounder and 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 1 33 



slower judgment and the domestic virtues. Our 
knowledge of Greek character shows how their 
moral nature was undertoned by the unhealthy 
stimulus of their form of government, although 
this was partially counteracted by the influence 
of art. 

The characteristic virtues of the republic are 
sincerity, reciprocal aid, and justice. The old 
appeal for pity and charity becomes the demand 
of rights, inalienable and inherent in every form 
of life — the rights of animals to adequate pro- 
tection and care — of criminals to all possible aid 
in reformation — of the poor to food, shelter, and 
work — of sound labor in either trade or service 
to respect and consideration — of children to 
kindly development — of women to freedom of 
thought and action. The law of individuality 
sends a fresher life through society, and the 
household influences tend towards freer and 
more distinct growth. The element of youth 
is pre-eminent, and manners are marked rather 
by simplicity and earnestness than the old 
courtly deference. It is not however until a 
government has passed the first stages of its 
establishment, that grace and beauty are attain- 
able in social forms, for while the fiery, molten 
tide still rushes on in impetuous action, and the 
"men of bronze" who rule the combat, are 
predominant, repose is impossible. 



134 IDEAL LIFE. 

The old utterances of the drama and the epic 
die away in this new age, but a new power in 
literature has arisen. The modern novel has 
been developed from the old romances, and is 
now used as a vehicle for the most profound 
thought and severest analysis of human nature 
and society. Without doubt it has aided in 
forming the broader basis of the new philosophic 
schools, which differ from the old metaphysics, 
as physiology from anatomy. The dramatic 
element survives in this form, and the greatest 
perfection of a novel consists in its close union 
of dramatic action and fire with thoughtful study 
of character and harmony of plan. The fusion 
of the two is shown by the ease with which one 
form is substituted for the other — as in Dicken's 
works, which scarcely need, altering in an adap- 
tation to the stage. The fine dramatic concep- 
tions of " Chesney Wold," where the two black 
and veiled figures — the true and the fictitious 
Lady Dedlock — advance and recede, following 
the same pathway with such weird effect, is 
suggested in the original story, and so are also 
Tulkinghorn's words, which sound the jarring 
key-note of murder through all the glory of the 
moonlit garden. "The night is very still, it is 
as still as death." 

In a republic all the arts partake of the re- 
publican idea. Architecture changes into house- 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. ' 1 35 



hold art, used for building larger and lovelier 
homes instead of palaces and cathedrals. In 
music one revolution succeeds another. Bee- 
thoven, with his full harmonies, 

**■ That sweep the chords, 
In which our heaven is set." 

was as daring an innovator to the masters of 
counterpoint and figure, as Wagner is now 
deemed. Gluck was a reformer to the light 
Italian school. ^Its melodies are charming," 
he said, " but they do not draw blood," and he 
demanded the reunion of poetic verity with 
musical sound. Weber utters with his Volk- 
Leider and romances the voice of the people, 
and repeats their legends and fancies in his 
language of harmony. Painting also is changed 
by the new master-thought, and Lucas Kranach, 
Holbein and Hogarth establish a new school of 
art, whose sharp satires and rebukes fall heavily 
on those unworthily clothed with authority. 
The homely, every- day- life was invested with 
new interest by the Flemish painters, who por- 
tray the peasant's work, the simple inn and 
kitchen with pots and pans shining in the light, 
the old mill, the group around the beer-cask, 
with astonishing skill and vigor. Landseer 
opens the animal kingdom, and shows us the 
characteristic traits, the joys and sorrows of 



I36 IDEAL LIFE. 

these dumb creatures. We arc not ashamed to 
weep over the little fawn seeking its mother — 
dead in the Highland snows, or the shepherd's 
faithful mourner, or the dog who defends his 
unconscious master from the terrible swoop of 
the Alpine eagles. In our landscapes the pas- 
sion and the power of the mute earth are re- 
vealed. 

"Nothing here is common or unclean." 

In the Athenian republic the exquisite sim- 
plicity and strength of sculpture were at their 
highest, for the statue is a visible form of indi- 
vidual grace, and stands apart as the embodiment 
of the serenest and brightest mood of republican 
influences. But somewhat of the kingly senti- 
ment and hero worship was blended closely with 
classic republicanism, and so we have also their 
bas-reliefs, which are epics in form, and whose 
successions of grand and stately warriors, linked 
dancers, and long lines of laden worshippers, 
express the full idea of continuity. 

I cannot pause here without quoting for ycu 
a beautiful paragraph, which illustrates the ten- 
derness and closeness with which the arts group 
themselves around the ruling life of their time 
and country. 

"I ask nothing of you, nothing, but that you 
will deal with the republic, think of it, feel for 



IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 37 



it, as art has done in all days. Ask the poet of 
the republic, and he sings of it — as a woman. 
Ask the sculptor, and the myth arises, and 
stands up — a woman. Ask the artist, and you 
behold a woman. Think of it so, in its growth 
keep it as tenderly as you would the girl child 
you take from your wife's knees. Love it, and 
woo it with such pure ardour, as you would the 
woman you have chosen out of the whole world. 
Shield it from reproach or shame, as you would 
the sister nursed at the same breast ; when it 
has grown old, guard it, as you would the grave 
of that mother who gave you birth." 



THE USES OF ART. 1 39 



PART III.— CHAPTER I. 

THE ARTISTIC LIFE. 
THE USES OF ART. 

(§pHE entire circle of the ideal life is complete 
fc§ in art. The desires, which first kindled 
the individual nature, become the intellectual 
apprehensions of the races ; and nurtured by the 
visible and tangible arts, inspire human lives 
with fresh aspirations. Every work of genius is 
germinal, and grows in all soil fitted to receive 
it. It has this vitality because it is " the out- 
ward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual 
grace," which its colors, forms and tones strive 
perpetually to express. 

From the beginning a warfare has been waged 
between the visible and the invisible. Every 
life is called to choose between the angelic and 
the earthly, the interests of to-day and the ends 
of eternity, between spirit and matter, good and 



I4O IDEAL LIFE. 

evil, life and death. There is but one kingdom 
and the rule cannot be divided ; one must reign 
and the other serve. Wherever the lower con- 
quers, you have the deathly philosophy and 
science which reduce men to the level of the 
brute, and regard all intellectual and spiritual 
life only as more subtle modifications of matter ; 
which limit human existence — as individual and 
human — to the fragment of three-score and ten 
imperfect years. It has been the glory of art 
that she has bourne witness of the invisible vir- 
tues and powers of the soul, — of the human, 
spiritual and divine natures. "If the best in 
this kind are but shadows" they, like shadows, 
attest the presence of the substances which casts 
them. The attestation has been the source of 
all true life in art. Wherever she has laid aside 
the robes of her ministration to lend herself to 
the lower service of material pleasures, she has 
become a lifeless form, for the living and sacred 
flame which kindled the old signs and symbols 
into beauty, was gone. 

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 
Rome was one of the central cities of the world, 
and Italy stood foremost among the nations in 
her comprehension of the secrets of form and 
color, her requisite skill of workmanship, the 
learning of her universities, the bravery of her 
troops, her great cities, walled, paved and ter- 



THE USES OF ART. I4I 



raced, and full of fountains, palaces and glorious 
churches. Many races were brought together 
by the extensive operations of her commerce. 
Even in the eleventh century the banners of 
Pisa were victorious on the seas, and her streets 
thronged with Hebrews, Arabians and traders 
from far off lands, bringing rich fabrics and gems 
and spices ; and here began the revival of art — 
in the school of painting established by Nicolo 
Pisano, and in the architecture of the Pisan 
tower, baptistery and the Campo Santo. 

The street life of Bruges, call the " Venice of 
the North" during its connection with the In- 
dian and Lombard trade, glows upon the canvas 
of the Van Eycks, filled with ecclesiastics of 
various orders, courtiers wearing the badge of 
the Golden Fleece, peasants in quaint garbs, 
Italians, French, English, Jews and oriental 
merchants. And so the rich and varied life of 
Venice itself, with its intermingled elements of 
Greek and Eastern arts, flows into the work of 
Bellini, Giorgione, Tintoret, Titian and Veron- 
ese. In Etruscan Florence, inheriting the hand 
and eye of the artist from a race centuries old 
in art, receiving from the Romans the law of the 
city, from the Greek vitality and grace of form, 
energy and force from the wild races of Lom- 
bard and Norman soldiers and hunters, and 
from the Arabians, and other races of the east, 



142 IDEAL LIFE. 

richness of color, and the dream of the solitary 
desert,* — in Florence we see the ripening of 
these in Cimabue, Giotto, Angelo, Raphael, 
Dante, Bocaccio, and many others. 

But the tides of impulse and energy which 
flowed out from these great cities carried with 
them spiritual death and corruption, denial and 
rejection, instead of the life, the joyful affirma- 
tion which characterizes the religious movement 
of the century before when the heart of Europe 
was thrilled with conviction of love at the sound 
of one man's earnest voice. Now fierce sin and 
fraud, and sensual indulgence alternated with 
deadly lethargy and coldness. The brethren of 
the " Oratory of Divine Love " weep and mourn 
over those who choose, with faces averted from 
the light, the dark and miry places of sin. In 
Germany a movement of reaction has already 
begun, but is there no witness here? These 
people are of such a temperament and mind 
that they desire no abstract truth of doctrine, 
but truth in visible fairness. It is an age of 
restless and stained and mocking lives, but the 
people who shouted for joy at the sight of Cim- 
abue's virgin, are not the less touched by Giot- 
to's pathetic telling of the Agony in the Garden, 
by the birth of the Babe; — their hearts echo to 
the passionate cry of Dante's vision, and from 

*See Ruskin's " Mornings in Florence." 



THE USES OF ART. 1 43 



the glowing altar and convent walls of Fra An- 
gelico they learn somewhat of peace and purity, 
of innocence and reverence. 

Raphael shows us an exquisite humanity, 
rather than a divinity, in his Mother and Child, 
yet I believe no one looking thereon could will- 
ingly deny heaven. All those artists who ren- 
dered by word or color their insight of love and 
faith, were witnesses of the light that shines but 
of Infinity. The followers of Michael Angelo 
called him "leaderand master, but not," says 
Tyrwhitt, "until they had seen the hand and 
power of a Divine Master working with him." 
Among all the revelries of the evil land stood 
true and steadfast men who endured to the end. 

It is interesting and significant that in Rome, 
(1500), two men were present, artist and monk, 
in whom the movements of new life in south 
and north thus came as it were in contact. 
These men were not wholly unlike in nature, 
though that of Angelo is higher and purer than 
Luther's, but each affirms, earnestly, strongly, 
indignantly, the reality of the spiritual life which 
he himself has learned with sharp pangs and 
throes. We do not find that they recognized 
each other. Michael Angelo was absorbed in 
his own message and land, and looked not be- 
yond that. He was not a man of genial or sun- 
shiny temperament ; the world at its fairest had 



144 IDEAL LIFE. 

never satisfied his soul, and his feet were set to 
go on their appointed way through hard and 
narrow, and made no pause for the world. 

Nor has art ever been wholly silent in other 
lands ; the artists in Germany, both in music 
and painting, have shown themselves imbued 
with the truth and freedom of their faith. In 
the English lectures on art, delivered before the 
University of Oxford, you will hear the full 
utterance of faith in the Lord and Giver of Life 
— for, ''if this were disbelieved the elements of 
dissolution have already entered heart and soul. " 
Another English art writer exhorts all artists to 
return to sacred work in sacred places that the 
brightest and most spiritual life in art may be 
rekindled as when the life of Our Lord was the 
centre of its inspiration. 

A little passage, which I read a short time 
since in " Old Kensington," by Miss Thackeray, 
beautifully illustrates how the art of music affirms 
a spiritual life, and makes more noble and ten- 
der the listening soul. It is a modern concert 
which she describes: — "A thousand people were 
sitting in silent and breathless circles. An 
andante of Haydn's was in the air. Though 
many sat motionless and stolid, you might have 
seen eyes dilating and shining, as mother's eyes 
dilate and shine sometimes when they watch 
their children at play. The childless were no 



THE USES OF ART. 145 

t 

longer childless, when that gentle, irresistible 
music shook from the strings of the instruments. 
The lonely and silent had found a voice, pent-up 
longings were set free. Other strings were 
sounding with the music, and it was not music, 
although it was harmony that struck and shook 
those mysterious fibres that bind men and wo- 
men to life. The hopelessness of the lonely, 
the mad longings of the parted, the storm 
of life, all seemed appeased. A divine se- 
renity was in the hall where the little tune was 
thrilling. 

In former times men and women assembled 
in conclave to see wild beasts tearing their prey; 
to-day it was to listen to a song of Haydn's — a 
little song that did not last five minutes." 

For this is always the sign of the highest art 
— that it appeals to the spiritual and pure in 
man, to the eternity within us, so that it may, 
if need be, touch a soul five hundred years 
hence with the same rapture and pity that 
thrilled us to-day. The Madonnas, the St. 
Sebastians and St. Jeromes of the early school 
of art retain their power, because of the love, 
the patience, the strength they express, not 
because of their several legends and superstitions 
which fall aside as the dry husk from the living 
seed. The inner meaning is not of one person, 
or time, or doctrine, but of the soul's life. So 

13 



I46 IDEAL LIFE. 

the Greek Antinoces, Appollo, and Mercury 
are beautiful now as thoughts of skill, and power 
and grace in manhood, beautiful, so far as the 
shadow keeps the outlines of the thought. It 
cannot be too earnestly remembered that it is 
the spiritual life of myth, image and sign, which 
makes them fecund and strong. 

It is of this I mean to speak. I shall not tell 
you of the different schools of architecture, of 
the circular and pointed arches of the Saxon 
and Gothic styles, nor of the Doric and Ionic 
columns, but I shall try to show you what the 
spire and fortress hold of your own life. It is 
not to sculptors, or musicians, or painters, that 
I address myself, and therefore I need not use 
the technicalities of their arts, nor dwell upon 
their histories. I need not tell you of the Ve- 
netian school of color, or the Flemish painters 
of shade, but I must show to the looking eyes 
somewhat of the glow and life which the human 
soul has blended with the touch on the beloved 
canvas. The theory of Wagner is not needed, 
but we must know what is within us that is glad, 
and rejoices through the infinitely sweet fresh- 
ness of Handel's Postoral Symphony, as if the 
world could never grow old. If I do not these 
things — if I cannot show you that art has much 
for the uncultured, the unhappy, the common- 
place life — I shall fail indeed. 



THE USES OF ART. 1 47 

But I think I shall not fail, for every man 
desires something higher and fairer than his 
actual life and surroundings, and he will seek 
and find it in every pure form of art that is 
given. He will seek it because of his hunger in 
many a form thar is not pure or high, but he 
will not find there the heavenly beauty of his 
untrained desire. 

In the old ages of the world, art appealed to 
the common mind of the people, and thence 
came the artistic culture of the senses which had 
given the nations of the East and South their 
exquisite skill and grace, their delicacy of touch 
in all handicraft and their wonderful perception 
of color. The worker at the Indian loom, the 
old goldsmiths of Italy were using the culture 
of generations before. It was not only intellec- 
tual training, but in the self-control and patience 
required by the work it was in some degree a 
moral training. The subtle and clear perceptions 
of beauty which the Grecians, Egyptians, Hin- 
doos, Assyrians, Etruscans, Italians, possess as 
races, were developed, and educated by the 
daily sight of the highest art, as displayed in 
the temple and palaces and sculptured ornaments 
of their great cities. Day by day these forms 
of loveliness were imperceptibly and uncon- 
sciously refining and quickening the ideas of 
the most stolid boor or peasant, until at last the 



I48 IDEAL LIFE. 

artistic atmosphere surrounded every detail and 
event of common life. 

No less strong is art in its attraction to the 
ordinary mind to-day when it is once brought 
in contact with it. During a visit to Cincinnati, 
I often saw the beautiful Davidson Fountain, 
which makes such a lovely oasis of freshness in 
the dusty city. It was continually surrounded 
by delighted groups of lookers-on. Most fre- 
quently these were rough farmers, plain working 
men and women, newsboys and timid country 
girls. In watching their faces, kindled in genu- 
ine enjoyment, upturned earnestly to the lovely 
groups of statuary and the figures of the children, 
which so exquisitely illustrate the uses and de- 
lights of the living and sparkling water in all lands, 
I could not doubt that it was already a power 
in popular education. There was not a mind 
there that did not carry away a new and strong, 
although perhaps undefined perception of the 
exquisite significance of the fresh-flowing stream ; 
nay, higher still, an interior consciousness of the 
loveliness of purity and truth. For these sym- 
bols touch you, even if you do not perceive it 
then ; they touch and move you through the 
force of the indwelling spiritual life. I do not 
hesitate in my belief that he who gives what is 
beautiful in the green woods of parks, in fragrant 
gardens or fountains, or paintings does much to 
the development of a great people. 



THE USES OF ART. 1 49 



The very lowest in education and culture have 
their longing for the ideal element. I have seen 
few things more lovely than a little negro child, 
uncouth, untaught, wild, whom I once watched 
playing with a white lily. She held it with 
wonder and delight, — with an awe of its shining 
purity, that showed how vivid and bright the 
sense of its beauty was in her mind ; stroking 
its soft, white, silken petals with hesitating fin- 
gers, and eagerly guarding it from every careless 
movement of the passers-by. After all we learn 
goodness most interiorly from the delights and 
loveliness of virtue, than from its moral maxims. 

There are so many who need especially this 
ideal kingdom of innocent pleasure in which one 
may seek refuge from fretting cares and pain. 
There are lives so ugly and meagre that they jar 
upon you with a sense of discord. The sick, 
the afflicted, the deformed, can find here im- 
personal grace and vitality and sweetness ; the 
hurt and maimed life here regains a symmetry. 
Art may be the luxury of the rich, but it is the 
necessity of the poor. It gives him a melody 
of which he has not dreamed, loveliness which 
the meagre outlines of his own days could not 
suggest, a height and perfectness which nowhere 
else can he find.* Its most angelic power is in 
the loving sphere of children which gives the 

*See Charles Bradlaugh's lecture on the Republic. 



150 IDEAL LIFE. 

broken toy, and bit of stone an ideal person- 
ality and grace, and surrounds them with a dis- 
tinct world of their own. 

This counterbalances also the tendency of the 
age to the merely intellectual training of the peo- 
ple, and restores the healthfulness and symme- 
try of culture. It gives back to the emotions 
and sentiments their true power, and subdues 
the hurtful pride of self-intelligence — for ideal 
beauty lies ever beyond ourselves. The artist 
himself needs the stimulus and support of the 
common artistic atmosphere. The magnetic 
fire of human sympathy kindles his conceptions 
to a higher flame. Was not the Greek audience 
an inspiration after its kind to the Greek orator ? 
It is from those countries where the common 
people love music that we gain our great works 
of musical art, as from Italy and Germany. The 
ideal temperament shrinks back, chilled and dis- 
couraged, when it finds no answering enthusi- 
asm. Without the sunshine in the air the flower 
cannot unfold its bloom. 

We need the influences of art for woman that 
she may find there an impei'sonal life. If she 
does not marry, or if she marries unhappily, 
personal affection will not suffice for her. Nor 
is it safe, when her feelings have the fullest play, 
to neglect the training of her intellect, for if neg- 
lected, its energy becomes morbid and restless, 



THE USES OF ART. I 5 I 

its subtlety sinks into trivial and petty cares. 
And there is in all womanhood the " root capa- 
city fgr art," which is the love of the beautiful. 
It will flow out upon flowers and household 
decoration and choice of color and drapery in 
dress, in an atmosphere that represses its higher 
ascent, but it must have scope. The intellect 
of a woman is not contented with cold and color- 
less knowledge ; in the art life it finds the fullness, 
the fire, the power it desires, with the restraint, 
discipline and patience it needs. And as the 
voice of a woman leads the following choir, so 
a woman's ideal aspirations should lead men's 
thoughts. 

The perceptions of the beautiful are very 
closely united with our emotions and our moral 
faculties. In Raphael it is not radiance of color 
or purity of outline that holds our heart en- 
chanted, so much as the womanliness of the 
Mother, the ineffable innocence of the Holy 
Child. Art has always held the religious 
thought, the "Church-idea" of the world; it is 
philosophy which falls into atheism and infi- 
delity. The Greek sculpture sets forth the visi- 
ble faith of paganism ; the Italian painters give 
us Catholicism, John Sebastian Bock and his son 
utter the belief of the northern church. The 
true artist sees first the uprightness and vigorous 
manhood and purity of the classic forms ; not 



152 IDEAL LIFE. 

the mere fairness of limb, and muscular force. 
The essential elements of lovliness are peace 
and repose of soul, freedom from all evil pas- 
sions. Even a line is full of moral significance. 
The flexible and flowing outlines of a curve 
suggest love and gentleness ; a long, straight 
line speaks of chastity and self-restraint, the 
circle holds within its oneness the grand thoughts 
of infinity and eternity. And when the circle 
swells upward into the cathedral dome the soul 
seems to rise with it, impressed, it knows not 
why, with the solemn meaning of its propor- 
tions. 

In color there is even more visible feeling and 
significance. The very technicalities of art tell 
us of coloring as harsh or tender, subdued or 
violent. In the early schools of art every color 
of the draperies of the Madonnas had its own 
separate meaning. As some writer says to 
change the color of the robe from violet to azure 
would be like altering the key of a song; the 
whole character becomes different. In the songs 
and superstitions of the peasantry, one finds a 
recognition of the expression of colors, as in the 
virtues of gems, which are characterized by 
their hues. Instinctively one feels that truth is 
suggested by the clear, pure azure, and again 
in the fresh coolness of green, while the deep, 
soft crimson and vivid scarlet speak of warm and 



THE* USES OF ART. 153 

passionate love. I never realized the full power 
of red until I went once in December to the Tro- 
pical Gardens at St. Louis. Outside the lawn 
lay white and still, hushed in the soft silence 
of snow, and the very air had a grey, cold look. 
But within the glass buildings, the palm-trees 
lifted up triumphant boughs against the very 
roof, the .atmosphere was fragrant with the 
sweet olive of China, and a crimson tropical 
flower lit up the whole room with warmth. It 
seemed the very color of life and love. Tenny- 
son, you remember, says of a lover's heart, that 
though it were long dead — " earth in earth " — 
it would stir at the sound of the beloved feet, 
and tremble with life. 

" And blossom in purple and red." 

The ideal life gives back to the earth a sym- 
pathy with the human soul, a flower to 
strengthen and refresh it. In its light the dumb 
landscape is eloquent. At the hour of sunset 
when every house-roof and spire and tree-top 
glitters against the red horizon, you almost be- 
lieve that you behold in the clouds shining out- 
lines of a heavenly city.* Or when the wintry 
frost sparkles like a veil of fine silver over all 
things that are near, and the fields that are far 

*There is in fact such a suggestion in a sunset by Innes. 
14 



154 IDEAL LIFE. 

off lie so soft and white that they seem unreal 
and full of dreams, you may gain exquisite sug- 
gestions of peace and clearness of soul. In this 
development of spiritual sight and hearing, 
there is nothing, — not a cool spot of verdure, 
not a stirring of the wind in the boughs, not a 
flush of rose at dawn — that does not speak of 
eternal truths. 



LANDSCAPE. 1 55 



CHAPTER II. 



THE MATERIALS OF ART. 



I. LANDSCAPE. 



SPHE forms of all the arts have their motifs in 
&t the life of the earth. The vibratory and 
pulsating tones of music are from sounds in the 
air; in architecture it is said that the calyx of a 
flower above its stalk suggested the form of the 
column and capital. The earliest Egyptian 
column was simply a lotus stalk, topped by its 
calyx, and the "lotus is interlaced with infinite 
grace in the volutes of the Ionic capitals," as 
the acanthus leaves are used in the Corinthian. 
Gothic architecture finds its first suggestions in 
the interwoven traceries and arches of the forest 
boughs ; and from the rich and delicate colors 
of earth and sky, their tender shades, and pure, 
white lights, Painting draws its wonderful effects. 
We group around her scenes a thousand fancies, 



156 IDEAL LIFE. 

subtle, vague, yet full of delight ; but it was her 
winter snow-shower — her moon-lit night in June 
— that set all the keys a-playing ! 

The thesaurus of all the arts of Design, of 
color, of light and shade, and of form, is found 
here. Paintings in fresco and on canvas, en- 
gravings and etchings, sculpture in marble or 
rare carving in wood-work, Faience, with its 
brilliant tints and fine enamel, fairy-like designs 
in mosaic and gems, the deep, full hues of 
stained glass, and the devices of woven tapestry 
and laces, all gain color or outline from her 
stores. From her are drawn the quaint fancies 
of the Lombard carvers, for Nature also has her 
grotesque moods — hours seemingly of laughter 
and jest, with caricatures of human shape, and 
animals in fleeting cloud-forms, in distorted lines 
of old trunks of trees and crooked boughs and 
in mockeries of fantastic shadow-plays. There 
are cliffs with outline of colossal heads, and 
mountains which seem to trace a grand form 
lying beneath a winding-sheet with hands folded 
and the feet close together. The human soul 
looks on Nature through the colored light of 
humanity, and fancies that he sees his own 
image among her endless devices of grace and 
richness. 

•' Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety." 



LANDSCAPE. 157 

t 

Every artist, whatever his craft may be, must 
learn of her teaching. Those who work in 
gems, the rare intaglio, the pure white designs 
in cameo, or in metals, the rich gold, the frosted 
silver, the fiery bronze, iron, which may be cast 
in strange lightness and intricate grace of shape, 
must study her forms as closely as the higher 
artists. Work in these metallic substances, 
which suggest color without distinctly possess- 
ing it, — for the reality of color is lost beside their 
peculiar characteristic of undulating light and 
shade, — is a separate Art. Their linked vibra- 
tions from bright to dark, their polished surfaces 
on which the flashing and shimmering rays play 
as on glancing waves, are won from nature, and 
are surpassed by her. The darting coils of the 
serpent, and the burnished scales of the fish, 
are swifter and more shining than the work of 
silver or gold-smith. 

In Nature also is sounded the key-note of the 
innumerable myths of sun and moon and stars, 
of the mother earth in her sorrow and her joy, of 
the winds and the clouds — (the long-haired 
swan-maidens and the cattle of Geryon are the 
rain-clouds,) — the struggle between Night and 
Dawn, which we find again and again in the 
stories of the simpler and earlier races. And 
farther on stories of dark woods and enchanted 
forests ; of dryads and mountain gnomes, songs 



I58 IDEAL LIFE. 

and legends alike interlace in another group of 
sympathetic relations around the thought of the 
river. There are the boat-songs with the ripple 
of the waves and the dash of oars ; and the 
river myths, which would form almost a dis- 
tinct literature, full of suggestions of cool and 
shining waters, of rythmical flow, and sudden 
dark places, as in the sad stories of the Northern 
Neckar and the Kelpie. 

There you find the human story interwoven 
with the art-form of nature, as you must find it 
indeed in every high and noble work of art. 
Unconsciously sometimes the human history 
traces itself line by line in the workman's daily 
work, as in the old carved cabinet of ebony. 

"Some old Venetian wrought his life 
In its quaint, countless vagaries; 
Its ebon fronts with hints are rife 
Of friends, of foes, of children, wife, 
A Satyr's face — and now a Mary's," 

The higher thought always rules the mechani- 
cal work of the practiced hands ; just as when 
a musician plays his mood sways the almost un- 
noticed motion of his fingers upon the ivory 
keys, and mars or increases the delicacy and 
pathos of his touch. The divine hunger and 
thirst of the soul cannot be satisfied with out- 
ward form and color. Everywhere it seeks a 
higher thought. 



LANDSCAPE. 1 59 

Even in Nature* the human mind desires and 
beholds something of the spiritual and eternal. 
You look away to the grand mountains which 
arise between the earth and the heavens, and 
the cares and anxieties of your little day insensi- 
bly lessen and recede like yonder dwarfed figures. 
They say unto you, " wait — all things wait for 
the final perfection." Involuntarily your hands 
fold themselves in deep tranquillity, and your 
soul comforts itself in peace. 

Or you stand upon their jutting slope, and 
look down. There sleep the green fields, there 
winds the river with the bridge and its reflec- 
tion, — a shining circle in the red sunset, through 
which a little boat drifts, while the rowers lean 
idly on their oars, — there rise cool woods, hid- 
ing deep in shadowy places their still pools and 
banks of ferns, there wanders a sheep-path over 
the distant hills. Each has some hint, some 
half-open scene, some scarce-spoken word. And 
they say to you " Hope : — life has for you such 
unseen gifts." And your pulses quicken; with 
a half sigh the depression is gone from your 
spirit and you hope. 

But Nature has also its separate life, its indi- 
viduality, its caprice and its mockeries, its deep 
emotions. It is a different life from the life 
which is you. Its thrilling chords echo yours, 
but are distinct. It is a thought on the outside 



l6o IDEAL LIFE. 

of humanity. Beirstadt tells us in the "Black 
Hills " of one of its phases of passionate life. 
You look at the painting, and you see first a 
lonely pool of water in the prairie, gleaming 
white lights on its surface, which first seem cold, 
but afterward the red fires of the sunset glow 
visibly through them. A large buffalo stands 
near it. A storm is rising; you notice now that 
the dark clouds are tossing up; you watch and 
wait, and then you see the wind shivering in the 
long, thin grasses, and stirring the boughs of 
expectant trees. The storm comes into the 
picture apparently while you look. You see its 
coming, its movement, its sweep, its growth, 
— a living storm ! There are artists who give 
you other pictures, where you see a different 
mood, in which the earth seems to rest and be 
quiet. These will be quiet, sunny landscapes, 
lighted by flushed morning airs ; the foregrounds, 
meadows, or tranquil slopes with cattle feeding 
upon them. You fancy the far-off tinkling of 
sheep bells, and a wanderer who dreams of 
home as he walks. 

The separate life of the earth gives us one of 
the greatest sources of pleasure, — one which avc 
cannot find in the human conception, where the 
beauty is associated with longprocesses of thought 
and irksome and minute labor, — its spontanc- 
ousness. If you are tired, you have but to turn 



LANDSCAPE. l6l 

your footsteps to the green woods, and lo, all 
its leaves are glad for you ! You look at the 
stream, and behold at a glance its smooth flow, 
and then the headlong leap and rising spray ! 
All the winds and fragrance are there at once. 
It is living that is complete, whole, spontaneous, 
— and so like heaven ! 

Our love for Nature is very different now from 
the love of past ages ; and equally different is 
our understanding of her beauty. Nature sug- 
gests all art-forms, but landscape painting is com- 
paratively a modern art. With all the quick 
pleasure which the Greeks derived from the 
outer life, their literature gives us but a narrow 
outlook into its beauty. Their pictures of it 
are very beautiful, sunshiny, fresh, full of move- 
ment and joyous life, echoing with happy 
sounds, but not so many, or of so wide a scope 
as we might find in the pages of one of our 
modern poets. They are always backgrounds 
to human figures ; we will 'not find there dark 
crags, the unending sands of the lonely desert, 
the gloomy twilight of the woods. The very dif- 
ferent life of the ancients rendered this inevitable. 
Their circumstances and surroundings often re- 
mained the same throughout a lifetime and af- 
forded none of the strong contrasts, or the 
deeper insight into wilder and more solitary na- 
ture which our increased facilities for travel have 



1 62 IDEAL LIFE. 

given us. And the classic was utterly different 
from the romantic taste, and loved only bright and 
social scenes. Even the ' ' rough country " where 
Heracles goes to die, looks out on blue waters., 
dimpling in the sunlight, and the cliffs are alive 
with the glancing wings of sea-birds. In the 
old journeying — the gliding of a boat on a broad 
river, — ^he slow windings of an Eastern caravan, 
the scenery does not change in character for 
days, or sometimes even weeks ; and in the 
first case, it rarely leaves the haunts of men 
behind. 

Our habit of traveling by railroad has doubt- 
less had its effect — and often an injurious effect, 
— on the productions of our brains. We are 
swiftly whirled by rivers, whose green waves 
flash and foam before you, through mountain- 
gorges, sombre with yew-trees, by busy towns, 
and streets peopled by animated, moving figures, 
on again at night by cone-shaped hills with 
brown shadows from the cedar trees lying dis- 
tinct upon the snow, and a phantom-like vision 
of higher peaks beyond ; then the moon rises, 
and you sweep on, with white clouds overhead, 
snowy mountains below, and white moonshine 
everywhere, until the dawn breaks, and you 
are whirled into the busy life of a waking world 
again. It is impossible that these often re- 
peated physical sensations, the rush and whirl 



LANDSCAPE. 1 63 



of motion, the flying visions, and the tension 
and whirr of machinery, should not have left 
their traces on our mental states. As one strik- 
ing illustration in our literature, mark how re- 
plete are the writings of Charles Dickens with 
the images and cadences which such a strain, 
such an abnormal excitement of the nervous 
forces produces. His descriptions, even of 
the most quiet English landscapes, give you al- 
ways the sensation of being whirled rapidly by 
them. 

But in our restless lives there are some places 
where we have lived and rested, and which sink 
deeply into our hearts. I shall only express a 
common feeling when I say that the banks of a 
certain river have been such a place to me, for 
a river has somewhat more of human individu- 
ality and human nearness, than any other object 
in nature. It has its own vitality, and charac- 
teristic color and flow, and peculiar shore-line. 
The Thames is not like the Dee, nor the Mo- 
nongahela like the Red river. And it gives a 
living character to landscapes which would be 
tame and uninteresting without the freshness of 
its banks and the shining course of its waters. 

A strange net-work of affinities may always 
be found closely encircling the river-life. The 
boatsmen and raftsmen are as distinct a class as 
the sailors, and looking off against the horizon 



164 IDEAL LIFE. 

you will see that the hills seem to curve in uni- 
son with this flowing current of vitality, and the 
trees to droop their boughs towards it. When 
the waters are at a low ebb, as is the case with 
some rivers that grow more and more shallow, 
and at last sink away into the earth, the trees 
will seem to have a thirsty and anxious expres- 
sion, as they stretch their broad limbs over it, 
and their trunks bend nearer, and the little 
green leaves rustle and glance above its waves. 
Those farthest off turn, as if absolutely drawn 
along every woody fibre and root by the secret 
attraction of the running stream. I noticed an 
old root, tossed out upon a sand-bank which, 
by some caprice of nature, wore the semblance 
of a long-necked water-bird, and had, I fancied, 
a look as if it were peering into the receding 
waters. 

There are very close associations between a 
river and our life ; and in its swift passing, its 
windings, its fretting against obstacles, and its 
repose man sees an image of his flowing days. 
You better understand the yearning instincts of 
journeying races, when you ascend a high knoll 
and see the silvery streams hastening towards 
the river, as it too goes on — " olme hast, olme 
rast" — to the great sea. If you live near the 
river, you will not forget it ; you will think of it 
at night with the crescent moon and the stars 



t LANDSCAPE. 1 65 

on its swaying breast, and the cool, dark 
shadows along its banks ; the noises of its rapids 
will interweave themselves with the whole un- 
derflowing consciousness of your life, until you 
feel the loveliness and significance of the vision 
— "in the midst of it a river." 



1 66 IDEAL LIFE. 



CHAPTER III. 



MATERIALS OF ART. 



II. FOLK-LORE. 



fOLK-LORE has an interest which extends 
greatly beyond its legitimate province, 
because it contains within itself the germinal 
life of many of the arts, The music of Scan- 
dinavian and German composers is closely united 
with the wild legends which the Northern pea- 
sants delight to tell and hear. " Der Frei- 
schutz" of Weber, reproduces what he himself 
saw and heard at the target matches and zither 
playing of the Tyrolese. Wagner's themes are 
all drawn from old German traditions. "Lohen- 
grin," the "Flying Dutchman," "Hans Sachs 
von Nuremberg," "Die Walkiire," " Rhein- 
gold," "The Dusk of the Gods," "Tanhauser," 
with its wild Vinusberg, and the lovely miracle 
of the blooming almond-staff; all these, in their 



• FOLK-LORE. 1 67 

very names, show where the fountains lie, of 
which the musician has drunk deep. Oratorio, 
motet and mass are formed from the simple and 
strong Hebraic themes which have long brooded 
at the heart of the common people. 

If you would comprehend fully the Italian 
schools of painting, you must study the legends 
of the Church as they exist among the Italian 
people. The myths of the early Christian faith 
are very lovely. There is St. Dorothea and the 
roses gathered in Paradise, St. Christopher 
bearing across the swelling flood the Infant 
Christ, St. George conquering the Dragon, and 
again St. Margaret, before whose childlike face 
and lifted palm-branch, the Dragon lies pros- 
trate. There is always conflict, labor and dark- 
ness of death, but over all rises the light of a 
child's innocence, and faith in the supreme love. 

The seeds of the epic, the drama, the romance 
are found also in the ballads and stories of the 
peasants ; and to understand sculpture and its 
forms, you must seek the Grecian folk-stories, 
for there you will see the origin of its concep- 
tions, among a people who have lain so near the 
breasts of the Mother Earth that they have 
drunk in her vitality and power. 

Folk-lore, for the most part, consists of the 
thoughts of ignorant, but kindly country men 
and women, and its colors, when vivid, are often 



1 68 IDEAL LIFE. 

set, mosaic-wise, in lives which would be other- 
wise tedious and trivial. In the first place, it 
has the advantage of being so earnestly believed 
in that its stories come to us as if still warm 
with the flesh and blood contact of human 
hands. The imagination and the faith of the 
homely working people are here fused in one, 
and crystallize into lovely and poetic forms, as in 
the Greek fables of the beings who lived in the 
woods and waters around them. Some of these 
myths are full of a strong, out-of-door, freedom. 
There is one figure, for instance, whose gambols 
and freaks are depicted continually in sculpture 
and bas-relief, — the Faun. The long-eared 
Faun of Praxiteles, the Dancing Faun, the Faun 
and Child, the Satyr who sits down to eat with 
the astonished peasants ; everywhere you meet 
this familiar, shaggy, and not unfriendly crea- 
ture, with his hoofs and long ears, rejoicing in a 
wild, free life of forest and mountain, and seem- 
ing not very unlike the primitive man in whose 
nature the animal desires and instincts are still 
strong and keen. From the folk-lore of the 
Greeks also, Art takes another strange race of 
dual vitality, half beastly, half human, the 
Centaurs, — savage and violent — forever longing 
for, and yet forever held aloof from, the sweet- 
ness of human companionship and the greatness 
of human interests. 



FOLK-LORE. 1 69 

The metamorphoses of the Gods, and their 
human loves and semblance, are from the tradi- 
tions of the masses, and perpetuated by Art in 
the still repose of the marble and the stone. I 
do not believe that these myths possessed an 
interior meaning from the purely Greek mind. 
All things, — and therefore all words, which are 
the shadows of things, — possess at the core an 
ideal life ; and if, therefore, you strike upon 
beautiful and concealed meanings in a work of 
Art, it does not follow that there is a conscious 
and symmetrical intention on the part of the 
artist, or poet, to weave these throughout. You 
may find those of which he has known nothing, 
for there is a latent symmetry in thought because 
of its Divine o?igin. Y( a man tells faithfully 
the ideas and intuitions which come to him in 
moods of inspiration, it cannot but result that 
there will be depths therein beyond his fathom- 
ing, and a loveliness larger than the scope of 
his own vision. 

The belief iftthis latent symmetry is entirely 
different from the esoteric interpretations of the 
later Platonists on the one hand, and the more 
modern theory of "unconscious cerebration" 
on the other, for I do not consider it a product 
of the thinker's brain, acting consciously or 
otherwise. A thought comes into the mind, 
how or whence we cannot tell ; the same thought 

IK 



I70 IDEAL LIFE. 

to many, as we may prove by the coincidence 
of discoveries, inventions, and even poetic con- 
ceptions, but more or less of its symmetry is 
perceived according to the largeness of grasp 
and delicacy of perception, more or less ex- 
pressed, in proportion to the facility of language 
and distinctness of imagination, I think our 
undefined repugnance to a story with a moral 
arises partly from this, — we feel that every truth 
should hold materials for all, — that the artist 
should find there something of his art, the work- 
man of his work, the lover of his love, — but the 
narrow line of the moral finites the meaning 
and rudely breaks off its symmetrical develop- 
ment, and dwarfs its fulness. 

There is a very interesting passage in Ecker- 
mann's conversations of Goethe, which illustrates 
how a thought may contain in itself much be- 
yond the apprehension of the thinkers. Eckcr- 
mann says: — 

"Goethe presented me with a lithograph 
representing the scene where Faust and Mephis- 
topheles, to deliver Margarite from prison, ride 
through the night mounted on two horses, and 
pass near a gibbet. Faust rides a black horse, 
at full gallop, which seems, like his rider to be 
frightened at the spectres that pass beneath the 
gibbet. They ride so fast that Faust finds it 
difficult to keep his seat. They are facing a 



i;i 

high wind, which has blown off Faust's cap, 
that is held to his neck by a string, and floats 
at a distance behind him. He turns towards 
Mephistopheles a face full of anxiety, and seems 
to wait his reply. Mephistopheles is tranquil, 
evinces no fear, and demeans himself as a su- 
perior being. He is not mounted on a living 
horse — he dislikes living things. And then he 
has no need of them — his will suffices to trans- 
port him through space as rapidly as the wind. 
He has a horse only because it is necessary that 
he should seem to have one. It was sufficient 
therefore for him to find the skeleton of a horse 
that still had its skin. This carcass is of alight 
color, and seems in the darkness, to emit phos- 
phorescent rays. It has neither saddle nor 
reins, but gallops on without either. The super- 
terrestial rider turns towards Faust with a care- 
less mien ; the wind they are facing does not 
exist for him or his horse — not a hair of either 
does it disturb. I confess" said Goethe, "that ^ 
this conception of the scene (by Delacroix, the 
artist,) surpasses my own." 

It was not in consonance with the Greek spirit 
to conceive a spiritual or interior meaning, but 
it was eminently characteristic of Greek percep- 
tion and facility to see it when presented by 
others, and to incorporate it in their own 
philosophies and religion. There were always 



172 IDEAL LIFE. 

two classes in Greece. The first, superstitious, 
but quick and graceful in fancy, listened to 
recitals of the acts and decrees of Zeus, Poseidon, 
Aphrodite and Apollo, and believed them living 
and powerful beings, moved by anger, passion 
and desire like themselves. But not so with the 
more distinctively intellectual class, to which 
many of the priesthood belonged. They were 
men of culture and travel, and as intense light 
either brightens or blinds the vision according 
to the strength of the eye, so we find both 
doubt and denial, and a deeper faith, resulting 
from their consummate intellectual training. 
As evidences of the last we have ^Eschylus, 
Pindar, Plato and Socrates; and of the first, 
Sophocles, and Euripides who inveighs with all 
the force and fire of his ' ' winged words " against 
the lust and cruelty of the mythical deities of 
the Pagan world. Euripides indeed boldly says 
in the "Hecuba," "Aphrodite is mortal's folly," 
"The Venus that compelled you was your own 
desire;" and in "Helena," 

"Burnt offerings never filled the idler's store ; 
Knowledge and insight are the best diviners — ask no more." 

This last was written at a time when the com- 
mon people of Athens still profoundly believed 
in divination and oracles; and shows the vast 
chasm between the thoughts of the two classes. 



i?3 

The priests, and many of the young men ot 
Greece were accustomed to travel in the east 
and in foreign lands to learn new wisdom ; and 
their wisest men received much from the land, 
where the inner life shone with transfiguring 
flame, fusing all outward things into symbols of 
its presence. The change from " the capricious, 
elemental Zeus of the Iliad " into the venerable 
God of the "Oresteia" of ^Eschylus is attribu- 
ted to the action of Persian thought on Greek 
culture, and the Persians themselves had been 
brought in contact with the inspiration of the 
Hebrew seers. The idea of voluntary sacrifice, 
which marks the later story of Iphigenia, of 
Hecuba, of Alcestis, of the Phcenissae, and the 
Heraclidae, or the children of Heracles, is, as 
Froude points out, of Semitic, and not of Greek 
origin. It was not native to the age of Homer. 
Iphigenia, he says, is probably Jephthagenia, a 
Grecized version of Jephthah's daughter. In all 
these we find the higher life, treading under foot 
the lower ; love conquering the pangs and throes 
of death for the beloved, a wonderful and beauti- 
ful foreshadowing of the Infinite Love of Christ, 
who was to lay down his life for his enemies 
also. It is always the fairest, the noblest nature 
— nearest the Highest — that chooses to go upon 
this dark and thorny path. Such a thought 
springs only from a divine revelation ; and going 



174 IDEAL LIFE. 

back among all the old myths and religions of 
the pagan races we find everywhere the thoughts 
of incarnation and self-sacrifice kept alive so 
that all lands and people, however dark might 
be their shadows, held a dream and a prophecy 
of Christ. 

Heracles, the noblest of the Greek characters, 
is the Hebraic hero, Samson, transmuted into 
Greek form. Here we find for the first time in 
classic Art, a thought which sounds in accord 
with the Germanic spirit, — the Farnese Hercules, 
" with its aspect of touching and unsatisfied mel- 
ancholy " breathes the very mood of Diirer's 
Melancholia, — the sorrow that lies in all com- 
pleted work, the weariness of human attain- 
ment. It is the cry of Ecclesiastes, i ' I looked 
on all the works that my hand had wrought, 
and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of 
spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." 
This is the prison-house where the mightiest 
/ must grind; the unsatisfied longing for the 
higher, the pang of all fulfilled desire which 
sees the life of its dream ever beyond its grasp, 
the moan of the son of the Gods to whom the 
things of time are given. It is the witness of 
our immortality. 

We have spoken before of the myths of the 
sun, and myths of the storm, but only a race in 
its infancy is content with these. As man grows, 
he pierces through this covering of symbols to 



FOLK-LORE. 1 75 

the sun of Life, the storm of the Soul. So it was 
with the Greeks over whose minds the Hebraic 
visions had brooded. Athene was queen of the 
Air; true, but she is also the goddess of wisdom. 
Apollo is the Sun-God, and again the inspirer 
of the inner vision of prophecy. Different types 
of mind chose the old myths as centres, around 
which they wove countless meanings and tradi- 
tions. 

Not to all were the metamorphoses of the 
God sensual masquerades. When Zeus or Jove, 
the Ruler and Life of the world, revealed himself 
to man, each form of manifestation seems to me 
significant. Semele beheld him in awful flame 
and fire which consumed the mortal frame. Are 
we not conscious of thoughts which we dare not 
dwell upon — of a vitality we dare not closely 
analyze? Far down in the innermost of every 
human existence we shall find the fiery and un- 
approachable presence of life itself, where God 
dwells, and whoso looks thereon must die. No 
one who has ever studied his own nature can 
fail to know, that underneath all action, all con- 
scious thought, all feeling, there is still a life and 
power which he cannot reach, or influence, or 
comprehend, and that all the springs of his being 
flow from thence. The finest processes of our 
spiritual changes and growth are wholly imper- 
ceptible, and sustained by the inner heart of 
life, which burns within us. 



I76 IDEAL LIFE. 

Again, to Alemena does Zeus approach, and 
he assumes the likeness of a beloved human 
form. Our revelations of the higher Life come 
to us also in the heroic lives, the patience, the 
love of other men and women. Every day, 
every hour, the power which is above humanity 
takes up the guise of human lives, and teaches 
us, — by their forbearance with wrong, by their 
forgiveness, by their fidelity, — to believe that 
what is higher than all these will be more loving 
also. It is through the father and the mother 
that we first learn of Heaven. 

Lower down descends the Life and the Power, 

"Counts nothing that it meets with, base, 
But lives and loves in every place." 

— in the White Bull and the swan of Europa and 
Leda, — for the world of beasts and winged crea- 
tures holds also somewhat of our ideal and in- 
terior life. Else what means the human-headed 
and winged bulls of Assyrian Art, which sym- 
bolize the human wisdom, the swift thought, the 
mighty strength of their Deities ? Or the won- 
derful creatures, "living natures," full of ex- 
haustless energy and fire, in the visions and 
trances of the Hebrew seers ? Eor these saw in 
ecstatic illumination the inner and living forms 
of earthly things, which are full of spiritual life 
and meaning. 



F^LK-LORE. I yj 

Even the inanimate earth and its metals are 
not devoid of the presence of the " soul of all 
things/' and the shower of living gold descends 
upon the imprisoned Danae, full of the power 
of Zeus, 

" And looking round about, could she behold 
The chamber scattered o'er with shining gold, 
That grew, till ankle-deep she stood in it." 

" But when again she lifted up her head, 
While midmost of the room a taper shone, 
A gold robed man there stood." 

Without this interior and greater life nothing 
is created, nothing sustained in being, "for 
preservation is continual creation ; " and there 
is no form of existence so low that it does not 
tell somewhat of this to the human soul. By 
its insight into this deep truth has art used all 
living creatures, all inanimate things, all colors 
and lines and lights to repeat its great thoughts 
of the ideal. 

The same process goes on in the traditions of 
the people. When they think of evil, they 
picture it as a living form, and give to it the 
hoofs that trample, and the claws and horns 
that rend and tear to pieces, and the tail, that 
marks it as low and brutal. And so we have 
the dragons of mediaeval legends, which fight 
against the saints, and the monsters of classic 

16 



I78 IDEAL LIFE. 

fables, which devour the young men and virgins 
of the afflicted cities. The Greek mind per- 
ceived also the subtle and interior evil, not 
wholly unfair in outward semblance, which turns 
into cold and hard lifelessness all the warm and 
innocent love of human nature, and so we have 
the head of the Medusa. It appears again and 
again in the gems and bas-reliefs of the Greeks, 
and Leonardo da Vinci has given it to us in 
painting. For he, like Michael Angelo also, 
was fired by the antique spirit at the first. 

There is no representation of a depraved 
nature more wonderful than this conception of 
the Medusa, which is so clothed to us with 
classic grace that we are apt to forget its real 
origin in the wild stories of the superstitious 
country-folk of Greece. It is the consummate 
expression of evil, for in the Laocoon, the man 
still is distinct from his foe, still struggling 
against the deadly coil ; but here every tress of 
hair is a moving serpent, stirring with the same 
life that breaths in the cold and marble-like face. 
Near the Pitti Palace, at Florence, is one of its 
most striking portrayals. It is supernatural, 
womanly, beastly. There is a siren-like and 
deadly power about the strong stillness of the 
features; a strange and horrible beauty about 
its faultless lineaments, the winged and graceful 
head. But the life of the serpent is incarnated 



FpLK-LORE. 179 

with the life of the woman, and at one with it. 
It is the symbol of a soul wholly lost and un- 
clean. 

The fairy stories of the German and Anglo- 
Saxon peasantry are often only surviving frag- 
ments of the old Greek myths. The story of 
Proserpine is transmuted into the tale of the 
Sleeping Beauty ; we find some of the traits of 
her mother in the bogey which haunts the 
country side, and the wrinkled fairy godmother 
who watches over a child at its birth. There is 
a striking coincidence between the first part of 
"Beauty and the Beast" and the story cf 
Psyche, — the ill-tempered sisters, the disguise 
of the beast, and the lonely mansion. The 
forms of the stories, it is true, change entirely. 
They are not so artistic or lovely, but they are 
full of a bright and homely fancy ; and their ca- 
pricious outlines are like those traced on wall 
and floor by an old-time wood-fire, which kin- 
dles the poor and narrow room into a flush of 
rosy light, and then dies out in mocking, flitting 
shadows, moving restlessly up and down like 
things of life. The tiny " gude neibors " with 
their queer freaks and moonlit merriment, 
abound in these traditions. We can fancy as 
we read over the dramatis persona of the 
"Midsummer Night's Dream" that we have a 
genuine tavern scene of Shakspeare's own ex- 



ISO IDEAL LIFE. 

perience, where the common workmen of the 
village, the carpenter, the joiner, the bellows- 
mender, the tailor, the tinker and one Bottom, 
a weaver, met to drink and gossip, and tell 
strange stories of Puck, "that frights the maids" 
and all the fantastic elfin train, Peaseblossom, 
Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed. 

You see well that those who told these stories 
and those who listened and believed, were of 
the rural districts and provinces, simple country 
folk, like the Grecian peasants, but rougher, 
more uncouth, and material. Yet they know 
well all the beautiful ' l permutations and com- 
binations " by which Dame Nature works out 
her processes in the sweet-scented spring weather. 
They know the "fairy favors" on the gold 
leaves of the tall cow-slips ; and the 

" Bank whereon the wild thyme blows, 
Where oxlips, and the nodding violet grows," 

as well as the fairy wanderers. They have often 
seen the faint primrose buds appear on the bare 
and thorny twigs, and the leaves thrust them- 
selves through the brown earth. And the world 
of fairy spells is always like the Spring, — it is a 
time of births and transformations and surprises, 

"Nothing of it that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a. sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 



FOLK-LORE. l8l 



* 



It is a plastic, liquid world, easily moved by the 
spirit into form, like Prospero's island, and its 
fair visions. And the stories of its wonders 
seem to be always told with a smile, so merry 
are these little ones in their ways and doings. 

" Lass uns sehen, wie froh die Gotter sind. — (Goethe.) 

When the tired laborer falls asleep by the road- 
side, or the unswept hearth, how they delight 
in surprising him with the finished task, or the 
granted wish. The dreaming house-maid need 
not fear, for they troop in through the ' ' glim- 
mering light" of the house, 

" By the dead and drowsy fire, 
Every elf and fairy sprite, 
Hops as light as bird from brier." 

And straightway the rooms are cleaned, and the 
bread baked. Very willful too are these tiny 
godmothers. They are like our pleasures; they 
will come to us, but we must not seek for them. 
And here again, you think of a day in early 
Spring, you have grown so tired of watching 
bare boughs and flowerless meadows, and vou 
forget it all impatiently, then suddenly, before 
you can open your eyes, the thrush is singing, 
every little brook is trickling, the buds burst 
open in the wet garden beds, the sunshine falls 
on your hands with a touch that can be felt — 

" And whether you look, or whether you listen, 
You hear life move, or you see it glisten." 



I 82 IDEAL LIFE. 

In these stories you will find no records of 
civilization and discoveries and inventions. — 
These are all a nation of child-folk, the annals 
of the garden era, in the first dynasty of lovers. 
You may hear the "eternal child-heart" beat- 
ing under the old and wrinkled form, or the 
growling beast, that disfigures the enchanted 
life. There is a deep truth in such stories. 
There are such disguises all around us. Some- 
times it is a cold and unlovely soul with an 
exquisite mask of flesh and blood, — with eyes 
that seem so tender, and yet never see you, or 
your need at all. Then again there are sweet 
and noble creatures, hidden from sight and 
touch, and waiting for their time of transforma- 
tion, like the poor princes and princesses of the 
fairy tales. 

There was a narrow, brown house across the 
way, where few visitors ever paused, for the 
place was poor and still, with nothing bright 
about it but the box of scarlet geraniums that 
made a spot of burning color on the window-sill, 
and the grey cat that laid beside it. Here was 
a poor, little, disfigured child, with features all 
blurred and scarred, but with a patient heart 
looking out of the brown eyes, that were so 
glad at any little word of kindness. This too 
was a mask, but the enchanter, Death, came 
at last to her relief with his magic spell of sleep. 



FOLK-LORE. 1 83 

Then the angel awoke, and she was so ready to 
love all, that I think she must have felt an inno- 
cent surprise and joy to find herself lovely and 
beloved. 

There is a strange kinship hinted at beneath 
these histories of change, when it is from the 
human form to the likeness of the beast. There 
are other Bottoms with their asses' ears than 
the weaver on whom the elfin witchery worked 
its powers. And within us all there is a little 
world with the plant and brute phases of growth. 
I suppose in every nature the fox of cunning 
creeps, the birds, our winged fancies, rise and 
fly, the serpent of evil desires glides, and the 
white lamb of innocence cuddles close and warm 
to its mother's side. Art and the legends of 
the people tell the same story, the animal na- 
tures portray a part of the human life. 

In these early myths of the races there is a 
far closer likeness than in the more elaborate 
and complex results of the mind. It is here 
that men are seen most plainly as brothers. 
From the daffodil-covered meadows by Lake 
Pergos, to the fields of England that bloom 
thick with cowslips, does not seem so far. It is 
the same thought that runs through the witch- 
eries of Circe, the enchantment of Oberon, the 
wehr-wolves of Sweden, the metempsychosis of 
India. It is the same yearning of the human 



I84 IDEAL LIFE. 

desire for its kind that tells of Tithonus, cold in 
the gleaming halls of Dawn, and of the change- 
ling who cannot be happy amidst the unhome- 
•like merriment of the elfin kingdom.. But every 
truth is told many times and of diverse tongues. 
Like King Arthur it does not die of any hurt, 
but is kept alive, — in some blooming and mys- 
tical fancy, — until the full time of its recog- 
nition. The great law of "like unto like" 
reigns; fairy lore is like fairy gold ; the soul 
that is akin to the airy, sunshiny sprites will 
find the yellow gold and the sparkling gems, 
while to doubt, or anxiety, or cunning, they 
are only withered leaves and dry sticks. 

For we always know our own. It was no 
native's ear that heard the pibroch at Lucknow, 
but one that had listened -to it from infancy. 
As in the old tale of "Beauty and the Beast" 
the loving heart will always find its roses bloom- 
ing even in the midst of winter snows. This 
story is one of the most picturesque and poetic 
of all the child-legends. Even now, as I sit 
watching the great storm of snow in the air, 
whirling wildly across ships at offing and forest 
trees inland, drifting so fast, that with shut eyes 
I still seem to see it whirling past me in the 
dark, — even now I can fancy that lonely and 
benighted journey. Across the moors, for 
nothing is so desolate as a long, level stretch 



FOLK-LORE. 1 85 

of barren land in the dusk, and after the weary 
traveler cries the wind. He sees the lighted 
house, and enters half afraid at the silence and 
light which hold in twin state the vacant room. 
No shadow fails on the wall, no step echos on 
the stair, and yet there is a table spread, the 
fire, the bed made ready. And when dawn 
breaks across the snowy waste, there is the gar- 
den with its fragrant roses, greeting him like a 
vision. Ah, we cannot do without the child- 
like wisdom of these old stories of fairy-land ! 

He who comes in sympathy with the woods, 
will find in their silences and rustling boughs — 
the swift start of birds from their nests — the 
splash and drip of the water— a truer Egeria 
than Numa saw. At early dawn the grey shad- 
ows seem like fawns or homadryads- startled 
from their lair as they steal away into the twi- 
light of thicker trees. The dark, quiet stream 
that slowly flows and winds by banks of ferns, 
w T ill all at once fall with fresh trickling — as if 
singing low to itself — and glance out of sight in 
a thousand netted lights and shadows, is sweeter 
than any water-nymph of Arcady. For even a 
forest is not dumb when a human heart asks, 
and the revelation waits only for the eyes of the 
seer. 



1 86 IDEAL LIFE, 



CHAPTER IV 



SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 



(C^LTHEN once the earth and man are given, 
d >-» we must have homes, so architecture, 
which is at once an art and a necessity, arises. 
It also has its ideal and inner meaning. Apart 
from the artistic delight in symmetrical propor- 
tion and elaborate workmanship, there is a cer- 
tain expression in every building which uncon- 
sciously acts upon the sensibility. Some houses 
have a frowning exterior, while others seem to 
love and welcome us, and bid us come farther 
and farther on, through open doors and wide 
halls, and sunny suites of rooms. For the 
builders have built after the form of their own 
souls, — although indeed both the recognition 
and the expression of the thought may be un- 
defined and unconscious. We feci rather than 
think, that a certain arrangement of wood and 



SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 87 



stone, — that curve, that swelling arch, that soft 
grey hue, — says something that is lovely to our 
souls, while the same materials,, lines and colors, 
disposed by another master, jar upon our per- 
ceptions as disonant and false. 

The architectures of all races tell their histories 
and capacities; and the human types of thought 
and desire are wrought out in rafter and beam, 
architrave and cornice. Climatic necessities 
indeed induce form, — as the peaked roof of the 
Swiss chalet, and the Gothic buttress and gable, 
used for protection against the snow, — and 
modify the use of color and ornament, but they 
do not effect its expression except as they act 
upon the characters of the architects through 
the subtle power of circumstance and routine. 
The same severe and rigorous climate which 
necessitates the darker and heavier buildings of 
the north, renders the northern races men of 
contest and endurance, as we have found them 
in our study of the Germanic ideal. Every 
building, whether it be cathedral or temple, 
mosque or parthenon, university or warehouse, 
palace or hut, is some human thought of reli- 
gion, government, culture, trade or domestic 
life, expressed in form, and this form will be 
grand, graceful and pure, or grovelling, meagre 
and uncouth, according to the conceptions of 
the designer and architects. 



1 88 IDEAL LIFE. 

Let us return, for instance, to the middle 
ages. It is the period of feudalism, and the ideal 
of leadership is force. The Ajax and Achilles 
of the Homeric epic, with their muscular strength 
and activity, and their strong animal spirits, 
would have been first among the free-booters of 
the middle ages as they were among the com- 
batants of the Trojan siege. For the men of 
brute force and energy who, under the complex 
conditions of modern civilization fall into the 
rear ranks as pugilists, draymen, blacksmiths, 
are the leaders and heroes of the rougher and 
more primitive life. As the exponent of such 
a society, arises the castle, which was the char- 
acteristic form of architecture in the middle 
ages. It has its watch-tower, looking abroad 
for the foe ; instead of windows are narrow loop 
holes, and slits in the walls, through which an 
arrow may be sent on its deadly errand, its 
thick and barred doors for resistance, its postern 
for a sally amidst a besieging force, and its draw- 
bridge to cover a retreat. Its whole dark struc- 
ture is thrown into fierce projections and angles 
and "buttressed by threatening towers, half 
emerging from and half incorporated into the 
mass." It is guarded by outworks, moat and 
barbican. Afar off crouches the village at its 
foot. "Small, black, scared-looking houses, 
huddled together like frightened children in the 



SUGGESTlpNS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 89 

dark, with warped, crooked roofs, and low walls, 
leaning and bulging under some enormous 
pressure. It seems as if the very shadow of the 
castle, which lies black and solid upon them, 
and stretches far beyond, was flattening and 
crushing them to the earth." Dark banners 
hang from the towers, the gate is surmounted 
with the heads of wild boars and wolves. Even 
the localities chosen for these buildings are the 
wildest that nature could offer ; hills, bristling 
with crags and seamed with ravines or harsh 
precipices. 

Does not this background tell us all ? Do we 
not read the rough, fierce life of the men who 
dwell here, their deeds of violence and oppres- 
sion, their lack of all mental sweetness and 
light ? The old chronicles are full of their 
exploits and their struggles with each other for 
precedence and booty. It is true that even in 
this dark and unquiet period there were still 
good and beautiful lives and high ideals, but 
this was its dark side, and it has left its traces 
in wood and stone and the work of man's hands. 
The religious idea alone rose up against it, as a 
shelter and a defense for those who were op- 
pressed and forsaken, — like the visible heavens 
which stretch themselves, with all their sunny 
and azure light unchanged, pityingly over earth's 
wintriest landscapes. The thoughts of faith 



I9O IDEAL LIFE. 

and worship are embodied in the cathedrals of 
Southern Europe most beautifully. Some 
writer, speaking of the symbolism of form, says 
that "an instinctive taste teaches men to build 
their churches with spires and steeples, which, as 
they cannot be referred to any other object, 
point as with silent fingers to the sky and stars, 
and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen 
light of a rich, but rainy sunset, appear like 
pyramids of flame burning heavenwards." 

On the wide plains of Lombardy, when the 
daylight first broke, the Italian peasant saw the 
far-off pinnacles rise in swift ascent, and the 
great cathedral roof shine in mid-air like a visi- 
ble glory. Matins and Vespers floated down to 
the wayfarer with all the sweet sayings of eter- 
nal blessedness, and as evening came on, and 
the homes of men were everywhere hidden 
away in purple mists and vapors, this gleamed 
with the last rays of the golden sunset. How- 
ever monotonous and hard and meagre might 
be the personal life, here was set a sign which 
lifted the soul up silently to a higher region 
where there was peace. 

Nor is there any detail of the Milan cathedral 
without significance. Workman after workman 
wrought out with patience and love his best for 
its adornment. Every carved flower is different, 
every scroll, or line, shows infinite attention and 



SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. I9I 

care. 'Master after master consecrated his fairest 
conceptions to the grand symmetry and richness 
of the whole. Here is the work of Raphael, 
these Michael Angelo wrought, this is the mark 
of Canova's hand, and that is Bernini's. There 
are three thousand statues in all, — a great mul- 
titude. They stand with spear or sword, cross 
or palm-branch, but the combat and suffering is 
over, and the victory won. They are of infinite 
variety, angel and archangel, and the earthly 
ranks of prophets and martyrs, patriarchs, saints, 
monks, nuns, hermits and soldiers, — a glorious 
army. ' ' Wherever there is foothold for a statue, 
there the statue stands. They look up, they 
look down, their arms are extended in benedic- 
tion, or their hands are folded in prayer, but 
they are of one heart and soul ; century after 
century has placed them here, always with the 
same instincts of sacrifice and thanksgiving." 

But the thoughts which were expressed in the 
old cathedral work were not always fair ; close 
beside the saints we find grinning gargoyles and 
grotesque forms of fiend or brute, carefully 
wrought out, because it is no one mood of exal- 
tation, or hour of rapture which is dedicated to 
the Lord's service, but the whole life with its 
sins and weaknesses, every day and hour, 
whether beautiful or tedious. And indeed these 
uncouth forms seem sometimes to quicken the 



I92 IDEAL LIFE. 

sense of beauty and love in this supreme and 
entire consecration, as the dissonant cries of the 
furies in Gluck's Orpheus heighten the pure and 
lovely melodies which succeed them. 

When you have reached the full height of 
the grand cathedral roofs, and looked down — 
on powerful and stirring cities — on the busy life 
of field and plain, spread out before you here 
as your past shall be in the hereafter ; when you 
gaze on glistening rivers and winding roads 
stretching far off into the distance, and look 
up to the white -mists and the alps that rise 
on alps, higher and higher, into the stainless 
sky, how your heart thrills with the scope of 
the vision ! Strange thoughts come and go, 
far beyond your power to hold or control, new 
feelings of wonder and delight sweep, billow- 
like, over your spirit. Here the artistic and the 
uncultured nature must equally acknowledge 
the power of this great thought in form, and its 
call for faith, sacrifice, and worship to the Most 
High. 

The scope of this work will not leave me 
space to do more than suggest to you how truth- 
fully architecture presents the capacities and 
history of a race. The temples of the Greeks 
breathe the classic spirit ; the Moorish palaces 
of Grenada — now, alas, empty and forsaken — 
tell the story of the Moors. You sec what 



SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 93 



manner of men they were ; supreme in all arts 
of grace and pleasure, of subtle intellect, of 
chivalry and refinement, but possessing neither 
strength nor endurance enough to cope with 
their more barbarous enemies. You can read 
their natures in their dwellings, so light and 
graceful, with such intricacy of ornament, such 
vividness of color. The creamy arabesques, 
like the richest lace-work, the brilliant red and 
azure and gold, the many-pillared arcade and 
corridor, speak of enjoyment, not of conquest 
or lingering defense. 

No less full of meaning in every part are the 
houses of modern life. It is from the door and 
the windows — the incoming and the outlook — 
that our houses gain their most characteristic 
expression ; and in these we find typified the 
broader liberality and larger perceptions of our 
age. Our doors are no longer barred defenses 
against assailants, but entrances for friend and 
guest. Instead of the narrow and dispropor- 
tioned loop-holes — literally meurtrieres — of the 
feudal castle, we have broad and high windows, 
full of the blessed light of heaven, and opening 
upon all the loveliness of sky and landscape. 
Bunyan, you remember, makes an exquisite use 
of the significance of gates and doors in his 
quaint and beautiful allegory. There is one 
passage in his description of the Palace Beautiful 

17 



194 IDEAL LIFE. 

which made a deep impression on me even in 
childhood. He says, "the pilgrim they laid in 
a large upper chamber, whose windows opened 
towards the sunrising ; the name of the chamber 
was Peace. ' ' 

A German artist gives us a picture of the 
Infant Child and his Mother, standing in the 
middle of an open door ; and by this simple 
image a grand and lovely conception of the In- 
carnation is attained, for it was the out-coming 
of divine life, the opening between earth and 
heaven. 

The roof, and the hearth-stone around which 
the ancients wove the supernatural and sacred 
guardianship of the Lares are full of innermost 
and beautiful meanings. All the sanctity of 
hospitality, faithfulness, charity, filial piety, the 
love of offspring, cluster around these, and make 
their very names the signs of all the virtues and 
powers of household life. The roof that shel- 
tered you — the hearths of your fathers, are 
words that touch all loyal natures deeply, and 
would nerve the weakest arm into strength for 
their defense. This religion of the household is 
as old as life ; it begins with the beloved touch 
of the mother's breast, and ends only with the 
faithful bosom upon which we die. 

A very natural and lovely symbolism is asso- 
ciated with the stairway as the communication 



SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 95 

t 

between the higher and the lower. Some author 
writes of the stairs of the unforgetable past, by 
which we return into old states of sympathy, or 
gather again into our keeping the treasures of 
vanished years. And I think some dim under- 
perception of a meaning — a half-pathetic hint 
of growth — comes to the most imaginative of 
us all as we watch some little creature of two 
years old, climbing slowly with the aid of its 
dimpled hands from stair to stair. 

There is a .little poem by Browning in which 
he speaks of our life itself "as the house we in- 
habit together, " and with fanciful grace describes 
the seeking of human nature for its full comple- 
tion, which continually eludes the seeker, al- 
thouge he range 

"The wide house from the wing to the center." 

Only the vague sense of a presence that has just 
escaped — the lingering of a perfume — the flut- 
tering fold of a robe as it disappears — is seen, 
and even while he importunately explores alcove 
and corridor, the twilight descends in disappoint- 
ment and failure. 

The image of a stately palace seized by riot- 
ous revelers, who sack its noble rooms of their 
treasures by the fitful light of torches, has been 
finely used by Poe to depict the state of a dis- 
eased mind beset with wild fancies. In the di- 



I C)5 IDEAL LIFE. 

vine word indeed the temple — the house not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens — is 
used to express the spiritual life of man in glory ; 
as the ruined palaces of the prophecies describe 
the ruins wrought by evils and falses. There 
are in truth very few symbols which possess 
more pathos than the deserted house — the body 
from which life and thought have gone away, 
leaving behind them only loneliness, silence and 
decay. 

Architecture has a close kinship with music 
— a fact which the Greeks seized with their 
usual quick perception, and expressed by the 
story of Amphion's lyre, whose music moved 
the walls of hundred-gated Thebes, and the 
rising of Troy into towers at the wild, sweet 
song of Apollo. When the rolling sounds of 
the grand mass swell upward, the dome and 
spreading aisles seem only their crystallization 
in form, for by some subtle connection music, 
in its returning spirals and long-flowing curves 
and ascent, always suggests form. In some dim 
mental region far down these two arts inter- 
mingle, and sound floats into vision, and vision 
breaths of sound in that harmony, which is the 
soul of each. 



SCULPTURE. I97 

• 



CHAPTER V 



SCULPTURE. 



§|3JUT if the cathedral is " frozen music," no 
W less truly is the statue, silence. We find 
this expression especially strong in one of the 
earliest periods of sculpture — in the old land of 
the Nile, where the grand temples of Luxor 
and Karnac rose, and where the sphinx keeps 
watch and ward forever over the desert sands. 
The Egyptian statue more closely approaches 
the immobile contour of the stone than the un- 
resting life in whose image it is carved. Always 
of great size, and at times — as in Memnon — 
grandly tranquil and beautiful in expression, the 
figure seems to sit as one of a mighty conclave 
of alien Gods, wholly disregardful of the little 
Earth on which he deigns to rest. The attitude 
is unvarying; behind rises a pilaster inscribed 
with hieroglyphic characters, the head looks 
straight forward, the lower limbs are perpen- 



I98 IDEAL LIFE. 

dicular and apart, the arms are close to the side, 
and on either knee rests an open hand. Life 
is not upon the face — nor even death, which 
implys a life that has existed — but rather the 
lifelessness of still mountains, the waiting of the 
dumb earth, the deification of a material and 
inanimate nature. We feel their strange power 
with awe-stricken wonder, but there is no delight 
or tenderness in our gaze. 

In strong contrast with this fixed imagery is 
the Greek world of sculpture, where every 
theme is full of vigor, movement, life, yet, here 
too is the pause, the silence ; it is movement 
that is arrested, it is life that is hushed. You 
find among the Greek statues wrestlers and 
gladiators, athletic and upright youths preparing 
for exercise — the wild revelries of Centaurs and 
Bacchantes — Fauns, who blow on their pipes, 
or talking amicably with nymphs and men — 
a charming little Faun, who stoops down to 
draw a thorn from his foot — a drunken Silenus, 
who reels as he walks — Hercules as the strong 
hero with his club and the skin of a wild beast 
fastened around his neck by the claws. Here 
too are the Gods ; the arch and child-like figure 
of the young Mercury — the loves of Cupid and 
Pscyhe — Ganymede and Jove's eagle. You see 
Venus crouching down as one who stoops to 
conquer, the Venus Victrix, queenly, triumphant, 



SCULPTURE. I99 

beautiful with all the charms of earthly beauty, 
but always self-centred, self-regarding, always 
with a calm scorn upon her lovely lips. There 
are gentler themes than this ; there is Hebe, 
bearing the cup of the Gods with light step and 
swift grace ; there are the child-like and sportive 
Cupids, who ride on the backs of the lion and 
centaur, and playfully compel the fierce lioness 
to drink. Above all, Apollo is pre-eminent, 
not the inspirer of vision and prophecy, but the 
immortally strong and beautiful youth, full of 
nerve and fire, the fullest embodiment of the 
Hellenic ideal. He is represented in many 
forms ; Apollo Saurocthonus, slaying the lizard; 
Apollo Belvidere, who discharges his dart at the 
foe; the young Apollo, playing upon his pipe 
by the teaching of the old God, Pan ; Apollo, 
resting one arm carelessly about the neck of 
the fiery and unruly steed which he subdues to 
his will; — but always in one mood of proud 
delight in vitality and power. 

One can almost imagine the fine and subtle 
smile with which the Greek sculptor chose such 
subjects for the silent stone. Their freedom, 
their sense of joyous life, cannot be too highly 
praised. Mr?. Browning says of some designs 
in Faience — 

" One might dream the clay 

Retained the larvae of the flowers, 
They hud so round,- the cup, the old Spring way." 



200 IDEAL LIFE. 

So you feel as if the image had started up spon- 
taneously from the marble, as if the ductile 
metal had naturally assumed these lovely forms. 
For you find the same spirit of active life breath- 
ing even in the lesser decorations of armor, and 
of the vases, on which long lines of worshippers 
move, dancing, bearing ears of corn and fruits, 
and playing on the flute in honor of Ceres and 
Bacchus. Homer, in his description of the shield 
of Achilles, speaks of the "whirling dancers," 
the nuptial pomp, the torch-bearers, " the 
rank on rank that backward falls." Every 
form suggests hurrying footsteps, sound and 
revelry. 

And yet when the distinct and accurate work 
of the master is over, these stand without 
breath — without motion — without desire. Beau- 
tiful, but still forms — the shadow falls on their 
patient limbs, the sunshine strikes upon their 
level brows, storm and lightning, war and civil 
tumult rage about the sanctuaries of the Gods, 
and they alone are silent. How strong is the 
contrast between this immovable art, and the 
subject it embodies! Mark the strong vigor of 
the group of the Minotaur, and the torture of 
Laocoon, who strives to repress a cry, the life in 
the writhing serpents of the Medusa. All, 
though they be very Gods and heroes in the 
eyes of the worshippers, stop, stand transfixed 



SCULPTURE. 20 1 

I 



forever by the bold hand of the artist. Venus, 
with all her beguiling grace of swelling breasts 
and clinging arms, is cold and still ; the winged 
Mercury, a-tip-toe, with the wreathed caduceus 
in his hand, must pause, though his message be 
from Olympus, and hushed is the indignant 
wrath of Apollo. The audacious sense of 
power, the keen satire, which underlie the tran- 
quillity of the Greek mind, and its unbroken 
symmetry of purpose, show themselves most 
strongly in this art, which is the culmination of 
Hellenic grace. 

There is reverence and a noble conception in 
some of these Greek forms, especially in the 
works of Phidias, in the statues of the great 
Zeus, of Pallas Athene. Theseus is a manly 
and heroic figure ; Hercules is wonderful in his 
great strength and melancholy ; the fragment of 
the Psyche, and the Diana of the Louvre have 
an exquisite virginity of expression. But the 
prevailing mood of Greek sculpture is neither 
reverent nor noble. There were vices which 
debased Greek civilization, there was no strong 
moral purpose in their religion, none of the ten- 
derness and sorrow of pity. Their highest ap- 
prehensions only grasp human wisdom and 
power and color ; they have no conception of a 
spiritual life or of a divine character. Their 
Apollo is base, who turns with bitter words and 

iS 



202 IDEAL LIFE. 

rapid footsteps away from the enemy whom his 
arrow has pierced. 

"The true Gods sigh for the cost and the pain — 
For the reed that grows never more again 
Asa reed with the reeds in the river."'* 

But these are haughty, cruel, hard; their ''fair 
calm faces" look unmoved on the sufferings of 
the human race. As Herodotus mournfully 
says, the most characteristic trait of the Gods 
seems to be their jealousy of human happiness, 
or attainment. 

So Greek art at its best spoke to the people 
only of humanity and earthly life, gave them 
strong men rejoicing in their pride and vigor, 
young girls and glad children, such forms as 
they might see in Doric Sparta, or Ionic Athens. 
You may find such faces and looks now in the 
procession of the Parthenon, the relievo which 
extends along the frize of the calla for more 
than iooo feet. Here you meet all Athens 
hurrying to the^ celebration of the Panathenean 
festival. You are transported into the midst of 
the innumerable multitude which advances in 
two parallel columns along the flanks of the 
calla. You are jostled as it were, by the crowd, 

*Mrs. Browning's poem of "A Musical Instrument," con- 
taining the story of the God Pan, and his making the musi- 
cal pipe from the broken reed. 



t SCULPTURE. 203 

by priests and victims, by virgins, by young men 
and old, on foot, on horseback and in chariots. 
You look to the east entrance, for there are the 
principal actors ; or glance behind you to the 
rear, and see various parties, moving to the 
right hand or to the left to fall into the ranks of 
the long procession. 

Where will you see such rapidity of line, such 
grace of contour, such brightness of design, as 
this art affords you ? Despite its grave wants, 
— wants which underlie all the dark places of 
Greek life and mythology — it has undying 
charms of outward beauty. It does not satisfy, 
but it allures, it does not rest, but it excites, it 
quickens your powers into new activity. It does 
not give you the highest life, but opens to you 
the beauty of the lower in all its richness and 
fullness. It is no wonder then that it has taken 
such strong hold upon the minds of men ; that 
Flaxman and Canova were so inspired by this 
wonderful antique grace, that the Greek bas- 
relief filled Nicolo Pisano with such rapture, 
that Thorwaldsen of far-off Copenhagen de- 
clares that he was born when he first saw 
Rome, — "before then," he says, "I did not 
exist," — that even Michael Angelo learned of 
the Torso. 

But the antique and modern worlds lie far 
apart. In the sculpture of christian civilization 



204 IDEAL LIFE. 

spirit rises above form ; and it is in the expres- 
sion of the face especially, the new life and 
meaning of the features, that christian art excels. 
Here again the difference between Greek and 
Christian thought re-appears. Modern art is 
distinct from the old, it belongs to a new world 
and is under new laws. In reaching after higher 
ideals than the Greek sought, it often disregards 
the ends which he attained and believed pre- 
eminent. The Greek never forgets the out- 
ward and visible form of the myth; nor the 
Christian its inner and vital meaning. Sun, 
moon and sea — art and wisdom and love, — 
nature and spirit are portrayed by the antique 
mind as persons; modern thought, using the 
same personal outlines, transforms them again 
into spirit and fulness of meaning. The thought 
of the one is concrete, symmetrical, but limited ; 
of the other, unequal, sometimes harsh in its 
very passion and strength, but always partaking 
of the nature of the infinite. The Greek art is 
the incarnation of all ideas of beauty and grace 
in form ; the Christian is the resurrection of the 
living soul of meaning out of visible line and 
substance. The Greek Aphrodite was a beau- 
tiful woman ; the Venus of later conceptions is 
the mythic spirit of beauty. The younger 
Shadoff's Filatrice is not, as the Greek artist 
would have carved her, simply a lovely girl who 



SCULPTURE. 205 

is spinning ; it is rather the image of womanhood 
with her quiet and dreamy work and household 
life. 

Thorwaldsen, the Dane, is steeped to the lips 
in all thoughts and forms of antique art, but his 
figures of night and morning are carved poems, 
full of meanings, too tender and loving to be- 
long to any people save those who have heard 
that the Lord Christ called the little children 
unto Him and blessed them. 

The Lion of Thorwaldsen — erected to the 
memory of the Swiss Guard — is not only a 
noble creature in the pangs of death, but a sign 
of mighty fidelity, of loyalty that is undying. 
In the drooping head you behold the renuncia- 
tion of a noble nature which will not defile itself 
with loud cries, which, though touched by infi- 
nite pains from the pathetic death-stupour that 
creeps upon him, remains ever reticent, unde- 
based, royal. 

Although you cannot perhaps define the dif- 
ference to yourself in words, yet you always feel 
how unlike are the impulses and influences of 
the two arts. The Greek art delights, the Chris- 
tian art exalts. Before the Apollo Belvidere, it 
is said that one involuntarily draws a freer 
breath, and lifts himself to his full height ; but 
when you enter into the presence of Angelo's 
work — if you see there what the master con- 



206 IDEAL LIFE. 

ceived — your spirit bows within you, you forget 
that you are. Its greatness dwarfs all outer 
fairness, and you behold it with the vision of 
the spirit rather than the eyes of the flesh. The 
mighty and prophetic fragment of the Brutus, 
the grand and incomplete figures of Night and 
Day, Twilight and Dawn, Moses, the incarnated 
law, with the unearthly horns, symbolic of 
power, upon his awful brow, are thoughts which 
could only have been born in the uplifted isola- 
tion and stillness of that great soul, which 
"soared to seek ideal form" above all worldly 
ambitions and phantasies. His Pieta, or the 
Virgin with the dead Saviour, passes the bounds 
of human emotion, — as there is a point at which 
the dying shed no tears, so this is beyond all 
pathos — it is death which has put on immor- 
tality. 

You hear amid all the conceptions and ima- 
gery of sculpture, the faint, slow minor of the 
thought of death. This is necessarily so, from 
the cold, white, rigid stone in which the idea is 
wrought, and the unmoving silence of the iso- 
lated group, or figure. We are accustomed to 
associate the absence of vital color, and the de- 
tachment from all back-ground or accessories, — 
the being cut off, as it were from all other forms 
— very closely with the cessation of life. But 
here there is again an immeasurable growth in 



c 



SCULPTURE. 207 



the christian thought. We have left behind us 
Acheron and Cocytus, the river of fire, the dark 
Lethe, which rolled their sullen waves through 
Erebus, or the vague shadows of the more 
peaceful Elysium. Homer's awful vision of the 
ghosts which crowd down to the brink of the 
river of blood, of which they must drink ere 
they speak with a human being, is no longer 
possible ; and even the gentler images of the 
later phrase of Hellenic thought are past. The 
sleep, the broken flowers, the extinguished 
flame of the inverted torch, do not tell us all. 
The child, in Charles Dickens' beautiful story, 
who goes up on the high roof, far above the 
working and the crying of the people in the 
close dark streets, and sees the clouds rushing 
on overhead, and the golden arrows pointing at 
the mountains in the sky from which the wind 
comes, feels it as an expression of the final 
change — -a sign of what this may bring to the 
hurt, maimed and unlovely lives which the 
Greek thought so carelessly thrusts out of sight 
and hope. 

All growth is indeed through perpetual pro- 
cesses of death, which at last merge themselves 
in life. This rising out of the hard crust or shell, 
this casting off the useless slough of worn out 
matter, is an inherent element of vitality, the 
fuel of death which feeds the burning flame. 



208 IDEAL LIFE. 

The ear of corn, says the parable, could not put 
forth its blade and harvest, except first it die, 
for the very thought of development contains 
an idea of something that is left behind — that is 
put aside. The very introduction of the chris- 
tian faith among the proud, willful, insouciant 
lives of the Pagan world, was like a perpetual 
dying, through which the soul grew with pangs 
that seemed to rend it in twain. But after the 
hard renunciation and humility and pain came 
at last the new life of peace. 

In all nature, in all human lives, under some 
form or other, we find this thought of death 
which sculpture expresses. It is in the cold 
silence of winter when the earth rests — swathed, 
and bound hand and foot like Lazarus in his 
cerements — while the flakes drift white and fast 
over the moor and pleasance, "lying equal 
in one snow." It is seen in the gradual dying 
of old age, when the man and woman fold their 
hands at last in still patience, and humbly wait- 
ing, behold at last the boundaries of the earth 
touch the heavens, that used to seem so far. It 
is a great consecration, it lifts up our best loved 
out of all reach of injury, of change or falsehood. 
And within the center of each household life 
lies the remembrance of some little child which 
has been taken away in the innocence of its 
early morning. About that affection cling the 



SCULPTURE. 209 

innermost conceptions of human peace and ten- 
derness and undefiled truth. If we have done 
wrong, if we have judged any harshly, if we 
have disquieted our day with restless ambitions, 
we have only to return into the presence of that 
stainless memory ; — there we believe and love, 
there we are sorry — thinking of the fair dead 
child, tears wash all our stains out of sight, and 
we humbly pray that we may be kept back 
from the sins which would bar us from the sight 
of its face in Paradise. 



2IO IDEAL LIFE. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PICTURES, AND THE PAINTER. 

vT^LL things hold a picture for eyes that have 
( ^s the power to see. The merest chance, or 
incident, — the light that falls on a young girl's 
head framed in by the dark — an opening between 
thick oak-boughs — two beggars who eat their 
noon-day meal by the roadside-anything suffices 
to reveal it. 

For no one ever makes a picture, or a poem. 
The symmetry and beauty are there, and our 
part is only to train the eyes to see and the ears 
to hear, and the hands to reproduce the vision 
and the word. The great central wisdom within 
all — the Divine Mind — quickens the thoughts 
of humanity, working by faint perceptions, by 
clearer apprehensions, or glowing visions, accor- 
ding to the degree of its reception. It is the 
same in different ages, and in different races — as 
we see in the conceptions of Joseph — Hector — 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 211 

and King Arthur — lest man should dare to say 
that it grew with his growth. Man attains to a 
nearer brightness, and falls away, like his own 
earth ; but the Infinite Sun shines on, vivifying 
all, bringing forth form and color from the dark, 
arranging all in order. The artist and philoso- 
pher do not originate at their will ; they can but 
study their themes, bring together their mate- 
rials, and wait ; and suddenly out of the brood- 
ing shadow leaps a conception, beautiful and 
strong. The inspiration comes in many ways to 
many minds ; to some a grand thought, a pic- 
ture, a statue, a dome, a symphony — to others, 
not the least noble, a just act, a strong faith, an 
ardent love — a life. 

But none who attain, ever dream that it is of 
themselves ; they know it as inspiration, a re- 
vealed glory. There is a ' ' power that worketh 
in us to will and to do," as is testified by the 
vivid experience of all brave and pure lives. 
Artists and thinkers wait for the moment and 
the mood — the moving of the spirit — the afflatus. 
Beethoven wrote from the harmonies within ; 
when Haydn heard his wonderful passage in the 
1 ' Creation " — And there was light — rendered for 
the last time, he lifted up his tremulous hand, 
and exclaimed, "It comes from Heaven." 

But all of us, whether great or small, have 
known some moments of light and perception. 



212 IDEAL LIFE. 

The chief difference between the Artist and 
the common man is, that one obtains whole and 
symmetrical compositions, while the other sees 
only in parts and fragments. There are few 
who do not perceive glimpses of the pictures 
which we, and all things about us, continually 
form, but this power of vision is so transient, so 
partial, that we need the intuition of the true 
artist, he, to whom every face is a study, because 
he can go back of the common lineaments, and 
penetrating into mood after mood, into likeness 
after likeness, find the real man — see the whole 
Life with its divinest centre. 



" Look long enough 
On any peasant's face here, coarse and lined, 
You'll catch Antinous somewhere in that day, 

* * * Then persist, 

And if your apprehensions competent, 
You'll find some fairer Angel at his back, 
As much exceeding him as he the boor." 



/- 



We sit, as it were, in our own dark of com- 
mon and unbeautiful things, until- other hands 
L strike a light, and the whole place starts up 
before us into right proportion and semblance. 
Yet these were always there. 

Millet, the peasant painter of Normandy, is a 
noble instance of this faculty of vision in a 
strong and true artistic nature. He gives you 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 213 

• 

simple and homely figures, — Shearers with their 
sheep — a sower, who sows his seed — two 
laborers praying in a tilled field, — and his land- 
scapes are a fitting background for such as these. 
The trees that he paints, struggle with a sharp 
wind, and his land is furrowed and cut through 
by the ploughshare. But what noble simplicity, 
what dignity and patience, what unconscious 
pathos, he reveals to us in this silent daily life 
of the worker! He opens to us the deep and 
steadfast forces that move beneath the surface 
of governments, arts, and creeds, and sustain 
them. 

The true artist does not wait for striking 
situations, unusual effects of light and shade, for 
he knows that Art is cognizant of the small 
as well as the great, that he need only open 
his eyes to behold what she delights in and 
seeks. 

Study Albrecht Diirer's sketches, -his sketches 
rather than his completed paintings, — because 
in them you may see more fully the spontaneous 
movement in work and play of the artistic spirit. 
Among the Diirer designs of Angels, Holy 
Families, noble and beautiful heads, come the 
following : 

Nos. 79, 82. Water-color sketches of flasks 
and fountains. 

No. '72. A bird's wing, carefully finished. 



214 IDEAL LIFE. 

No. 166. A study of sandstone rocks, — 6 
inches by 8 — with minute details. 

Nos. 149, 165. A cock's head, two sturgeons 
in color, a delicate pen and ink sketch of an old 
tree-trunk. 

No. 168. A study of three carrots and a 
bulrush, faithfully delineated. (Print-room of 
the British Museum.) 

He finds worthy subject in every form of life, 
in plant or animal, in every human gesture or 
motion. His No. 180 is only a crayon drawing 
of two hands clasped, but it tells a story of loyal 
faith and rest. He sees always, — as the true 
artist should — what is behind and within. If 
he had not, do you not think he would have 
wearied in painting No. 6 in water-color with 
such minute care and patience ? It is only a 
dead bird, but the shades, tints and colors are 
rendered with finest truthfulness ; even the slight 
ruffling of the feathers on the throat is given, 
while you can almost feel the smoothness of the 
breast. And the life of the bird, — its free spirit 
and wild haunts are suggested, — else no finish 
or technical skill, would constitute him a great 
Artist. 

At first, it is simply such a reproduction of 
single objects, or of one object after another, 
with associated ideas, which was attempted 
either in the early stages of art, or in the begin- 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 215 

ning of the individual artist's career. After- 
wards we have groups, more elaborate compo- 
sitions which require new laws — of form, 
balance, harmony. In the early Italian paint- 
ings the precise following of these gives an 
altogether quaint stiffness to the orderly arrange- 
ment. Some of these artists delighted in ranks 
and companies, like Bunyan's "shining ones" 
whom he saw by the river. The balance is 
evenly adjusted, as in Perugino's Virgin in the 
National Gallery, with the Angel Michael on 
the one side, and Raphael on the other. The 
form terminates in a kind of apex, the central 
point of interest, the culmination of all, as in 
Michael Angelo's wierd Atropos, with a Fate 
on the right and on the left hand. Or Leon- 
ardo Da Vinci's Last Supper, with the six and 
six disciples, and the Lord himself as Head 
of all in Raphael's heavenly Transfiguration. 
Judgment days, with divided throngs of good 
and evil, a divine person between angels and 
men, such were the favorite themes of this 
school. Opposing forces, with a central point 
of victory, or loss — there is the dramatic spirit 
with its antagonism and crisis ! Opposition of 
light and shadow — of curvature and straightness 
— of differing tones of color, with a chief figure, 
or light, which decides all. Do you not see 
that this art also is part of our life, and more 



2l6 IDEAL LIFE. 

than accurate drawing and vivid color— that 
these too mean somewhat of us — and that there- 
fore the artist gives up himself for his art ? 

Vivid color, — I pause here almost with low- 
ered breath, it seems so hard to place before 
you — having only the interpretation of words 
in black and white — what this is and means. 
So hard to tell you anything when others have 
said so much, and when the words of the great- 
est fail so utterly by the rich gold and velvety 
purple leaves of the heart's ease under our feet, 
or the flash of a white sail on the distant sea ! 
But one thing you must mark, that colors are 
not in nature, and so not in high art, ever 
given without discrimination and equilibrium, 
without what Jean Corot so faithfully studied 
and depicted in his scenes from the woods around 
Ville d'Avray — their true values and relations. 
Black we may leave out entirely, for as Ruskin 
tells us, all shadows are colored ; and then our 
opposing tones, or perhaps more truly equations, 
are of the red and gray colors ; these suggestive 
of ardor and movement and flame, the others 
of coolness, freshness, repose ; these grouping 
themselves in scarlets, and crimsons and violets 
and golden bronze, the others in silvery white 
lights, and azure, green and bluish purples. 
These octaves of color run through our world ; 
as for instance our beechwoods in autumn, 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 217 

bronze at noon and shaded into purple at twi- 
light, or our maples, with one member of the 
group placed over against the other in the con- 
trast of their gold and scarlet leaves. 

I saw this principle very beautifully illustrated 
during a visit to Dayton, Ohio, in October. 
Dayton is a cool, gray looking town, spotlessly 
clean, with wide side-walks, edged with beauti- 
fully colored maple trees, and handsome houses 
built with fronts of the white Dayton marble, 
and tapestried from balcony to column by hang- 
ing masses of scarlet-leaved vines. There is in- 
deed a secret affinity, a kinship between colors, 
which delights us when brought together in re- 
ciprocal interchange and influence. This is the 
secret of the beauty of the blended mosaic, or 
the perfect setting of rare gems. Instinctively 
the artist will light up some heavy and dark 
drapery with a gleam or border of lighter, but 
still correlative color. There is also a certain 
equation which exists between shadows, as well 
as more distinct colors. On the one side are the 
brown shadows, deep and rich and dark, which 
we see under rocks or in close, thick set woods ; 
and on the other the hazy, indistinct, mysteri- 
ous grays, the effects of fogs and mists and va- 
por on low lands, or along winding river-shores. 

Colors however, are greatly affected by the 
various media through which we see them. 

*9 



2l8 IDEAL LIFE. 

So far I have spoken only of the solid and dis- 
tinct earth-colors, which are in a measure per- 
manent and within our reach. But there are 
also the translucent water-tints of landscapes, 
reflected from surrounding shores or islands, 
which the lake and the river hold within their 
hearts. You know how different is the verdure 
of the one from the wavering, ineffable verdure 
of the other, with the shimmering veil of moving 
waters drawn between. There are also the in- 
tense changing, rapturous colors of the skies, 
with clouds that grow like the walls of the New 
Jerusalem, under the sunset glow and flame, 
when the colors of our lower life seem to wake 
up again, — " secure, inviolate, kindled, living, 
in the great resurrection of the watching 
heavens." 

Besides these, there are the colors which be- 
long only to the powers of the air ; the ghostly 
white light of the moon's rays on long stretches 
of ice ; the pale, flickering, dying blue of light- 
ning ; the brooding and revengeful red light of 
a destroying fire. 

There are also certain associations which effect 
our perception of color, and therefore to some 
extent the varieties of color used in depicting 
an event, or grouped around a leading figure. 
They must share the general tone of thought or 
passion, or the impression will not be one of 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 2 I 9 

harmony. Red means t>lood to the criminal, 
but a blush to the lover, and a change in the 
ruling emotion at once sets both color and form 
in a different key. The soft, pliant tree-boughs 
under which the two lovers ride in Dore's illus- 
trations to- the "Idyls of the King" are totally 
unlike the drenched and tormented limbs of the 
woods in the same artists delineations of Dante's 
strange worlds. Contrast the colors in Turner's 
11 Burning of the Slave Ship," and in his "Do- 
ver Cliffs." In the one they are full of passion 
and pain, in the other of peace. 

You see then that color and form cannot be 
separated from the spirit and life of a picture — 
or we learn as little as we should by parting the 
thought of a poem from its grammatical con- 
struction and measure, and retaining only the 
latter. It is well to understand these, and the 
different dialects which the Artist uses — speak- 
ing sometimes by spaces of light and shade, as 
in mezzotinting, sometimes only by lines, as did 
the four great etchers, Vandyke, Rembrandt, 
Ostade and Claude, or if he chooses rather the 
richer and fuller language of color, working 
either in water-colors, or oils, on glass or can- 
vass, or plaster, as in the grand frescoes of 
Angelo. For each of these means something, 
and with every translation the design assumes a 
new attitude, new relations, and groups its colors 



220 IDEAL LIFE. 

afresh. But this meaning is the real and essen- 
tial Art, and above its technique. ''The melan- 
choly of the unreturning river" — the tranquillity 
of green hills, lying fold on fold, — the simplicity 
of little breaks of the netted stream 

" Which with its own self, like an infant plays," 

are more than their accurate likeness and form. 

For, as you know that no delineation with 
Pre-Raphaelite fidelity, of skin, hair, lineaments 
and wrinkles will form a portrait of a man, un- 
less there is given also the " incessant presence " 
of the soul, — so you must show the life of a 
landscape, or a city, — the spirit which fills its 
curves and colors, or you are no artist. You 
must feel these as you look, or else it will be 
more manly and honest to go with avowed pre- 
ference to your wharves and storehouses and 
acres, if you understand the busy, active life of 
these. For Art is here, is indeed everywhere, 
only one should not falsely force himself into 
the presence of any one alien form of it. If 
you honestly delight in any glimpse of \the ideal 
or spiritual, vouchsafed you anywhere, the 
faculty of vision will grow. 

I wish especially to make you remark the 
childlike conceptions of Art, that you may see 
how truly it belongs to our life, — how far it is 
from beino- the distant and cold culture which 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 221 

| 

some imagine it. With the Artists who lived 
under the shelter of the Catholic Church in 
Rome, Florence and Milan, you feel as if you 
had entered among grown-up children, rather 
than adult men. Naturally so, perhaps you 
will think since they painted according to the 
legends of the peasant worshippers and the 
thoughts of men shut out and cloistered from 
the atmosphere of the world. But this same 
child-likeness is found in the arts of other 
nations. It begins among the Greeks. As a 
child says, — There is such a person, we know 
him by his mark, — so they, with their Gods, — 
Diana and the fawn, — Juno and her peacock, — 
Jove and his eagle. So too do these who come 
afterwards ; there is St. Agnes, we know her by 
the lamb, — St. Sebastian, by the cruel arrows, 
— and that is Our Lady of the mountain hamlet, 
for has not the artist, a native of this place, like- 
wise painted right cunningly into the picture the 
wild wood strawberries? For we dedicate to 
Divine service all, our lowest herbs, our fairest 
places. Then look at the occupations, the atti- 
tudes, the faces of these ! In Albrecht Diirer's 
design of the Virgin with the child at the breast, 
the two cherubs play with her mantle, — some- 
times they sport with kittens and rabbits ; in 
Cimabue's sad Madonna of the Borgo Alegri, 
the mother, unmindful of adoring angels, gazes 



222 IDEAL LIFE. 

intently on the infant upon her knee as any 
young Tuscan peasant with her babe; the Child 
Jesus, in Raphael's early design, is with his little 
playmate, St. John. Could you have simpler, 
more child-like ideas than these ? 

Fra Angelico's Angel with the trumpet, — an 
altar piece — delights himself in the sound as he 
floats through the air. The Psyche, with the 
butterfly poised on her outstretched arm — is not 
that the wonder of the child at the chrysalis ? 
Only we have learned its meaning. Often a 
childish remembrance or imagination will unlock 
for us many a dark saying and symbol. The 
old Northern proverb of the slow grinding of 
the mills of the Gods, — the wheel of Michael 
Angelo's wild Fortune, scattering crowns, — 
distoff and wheel of the three grim, fixed Fates, 
— the wheels within wheels, running swiftly, of 
the Hebraic vision, — you best understand these 
by returning into the days of your childhood. 
Do you not recollect the terror, the shrinking 
back, when your Nurse carried you down to the 
old mill, and you saw with awed fascination the 
rush, like a driven thing, of the waters into the 
deep, dark places underneath, — and the great, 
black wheel, — inexorably turning, and grinding 
out the grain ? So impossible to change or stop, 
— so great and strong and dark, — it became to 
the dilated, frightened eyes of the child, hence- 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 22 3 

forth a sign and symbol of immutable, inexora- 
ble Force. The conceptions of adult humanity 
rarely endure ; but the symbols which the 
nations take up, and Art makes fast, are invari- 
ably the thoughts of the child. See for instance 
how differently the two types of mind deal with 
personality. To his acquaintances a man is too 
often only a Burgomaster, a Violin-player, a 
Money-changer, a sign of his office or his work ; 
but to the artist and the child he is more, — the 
man with the sphere of individual life and love 
and moods and distates and desires, ever about 
him, blindly but instinctively perceived, like an 
odour, — he is a wonder, a mystery, a power. 
Study Rembrandt's portraits in etching of Jan 
Six, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Uyten- 
bogaert, the Gold-weigher, and Raphael's Violin- 
player, a portrait of himself, and you will under- 
stand what I mean. The busy, active work, 
the dreamy music, are the bases, but far above 
these arises the impalpable Life of each. The 
utmost growth man can attain is spiral, back 
towards the thoughts, — the enlarged, compre- 
hended, and fully realized thoughts of his child- 
hood, which are the deepest and the fairest he 
will ever come to know. Botticellis' Paradise is 
a true image, — for the little children are ever 
nearest the Throne and the Light, — farther off 
are the old and great in earthly honors. 



Ir 



224 IDEAL LIFE. 

Because of this very spirit of innocence there 
is among all the artists of whom we read no 
life more ideal or beautiful than that of Fra 
Angelico, of San Marco. Many were greater 
artists: Michael Angelo, unutterably sad and 
alone, whose work was "a segment of an infin- 
ite art;" Raphael and Di Vinci, Titian, Tin- 
toret, Giorgione, Veronese, with wonderful 
gifts of colors, brought from dreamy Venice, 
whose billowy streets flow everywhere, where 
you hear the tinkling of bells, and your sight is 
confused by its burning and vivid hues, and the 
golden sunshine glowing on rich facades of old 
palaces, all these were surely greater in art, but 
his life was a fair ideal, purely and beautifully 
realized. His days were childlike, rounded, 
joyous ; and it is good to rest and look awhile 
upon such green pastures and still waters in the 
midst of an evil age. His uneventful life was 
located in the City of Flowers, through which 
glances the ' ' arrowy undertide of golden Arno, " 
and he was sheltered by the simple routine of 
the convent from any outside cares or uncon- 
genial labor. So his pictures bear little impress 
of the world of secular thought ; the face of 
his St. Dominic — the Inquisitor and teacher of 
doctrine — is filled only with ecstasy under this 
mild hand ; his angels are like the infant mar- 
tyrs, who before the heavenly altar — 

" Day with the palm and crown," 



PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 225 



and Our Lord enters the guest-chamber as a 
golden-haired, beautiful youth. 

One chief beauty of his work was that his art 
lighted the working-room, the refectory, the 
cells in which the brotherhood slept, with its 
images; — for beauty is meant to feed and restore 
our life. Our days should not be bare of orna- \^ 
ment, but like texts from the Word, illuminated 
with gold and crimson traceries, or church win- £ 
dows, whose rich and rare colors the sunlight 
throws 'Mike a libation" on the rude paving 
stones beneath. 



20 



226 IDEAL LIFE. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 



M?HERE is a fine gradation in our growth. In 
£ji the dim, sweet days of childhood, Life 
seems like the musing organist, who beginning 



" Doubtfully and far away, 
First lets his fingers wander as they list.' 



Sudden impulses stir our blood, bright thoughts 
come and go, contradictory natures reveal them- 
selves strangely at variance, and we discern no 
complete theme. But as years roll on, we hear 
the thrilling andante movements, the strong 
chords of will, the swift and flying notes of de- 
light, and the long fuque of continuous purpose, 
and know they blend into accord. 

Without haste — with rests and pauses and 
changing measures — the music of life beats on ; 
and the art of music is antiphonal to this, and 



THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 227 



t 



interprets its melodies. The whole of human 
life has been shattered from its unity, and lies 
rent and fragmentary, — deep in the dust and 
dark," but with sudden perceptions of color and 
clearness ; — dead, but with faint stirrings of 
possible birth and life. Thence are all the dis- 
contents and yearnings with which our days are 
pierced, and of which music is the longing and 
pathetic voice. 

The very key-note of the art is struck in sor- 
row. It does not eliminate from its ideal either 
struggle or temptation, or even the meagreness, 
which is one of the hardest pains of life, but 
takes all these into its very nature, and shows 
the uses of suffering. It is true that at times 
the soul springs up from the darkness and pain 
that flow on forever on this earth, and we have 
such music as Mendelssohn's Spring-songs, the 
exultation of the chorus, — singing in Haydn's 
Creations, or the uncontrollable joy of Beetho- 
ven's Scherzo movements, but these are only the 
faint breathing of awakening morning airs in 
comparison with the mighty wind, "largo e 
mesto," of passion and sorrow. Oratorio, Sym- 
phony, Sonata, Motet and Nocturne utter the 
same language, and even the dance-music has 
somewhat of pathos and regret. All the songs 
of the people, negro melodies, "Volksleider, " 
Scotch airs, are wistful, interrogatory, plaintive. 



228 IDEAL LIFE. 

The epic compositions of Bach and Beethoven, 
the lyric thoughts of Weber and Schubert and 
Schumann, the weird, analytic music of Chopin 
have alike a nameless burden of unrest. 

But the highest music does not utter unre- 
lieved sadness, it lifts up the soul, and cleanses 
it from low desires, breathing into it the breath 
of its own infinite and eternal life. The deep 
and tender regret, which such music as Beetho- 
ven's lovely Kreutzer or Moonlight Sonatas 
awaken, is never hopeless or quiescent. The 
soul, thrilling through every quickened fibre 
with their celestial sweetness, knows as if by 
vision, what may yet be possible — the arising of 
the angelic nature which now sleeps — and fore- 
tells through every pang of deathly pain, the 
last "fine rapture of a spirit delivered from 
bondage." Our days may be commonplace 
and narrow, our work and surroundings of the 
earth, earthly, but when we hear a grand har- 
mony, straightway all is changed. The spirit 
casts aside those things which are behind, press- 
ing forward to those that are before — all the 
incompleteness of the finite life longing for and 
rejoicing in the fuller and more beautiful com- 
pleteness, born of temptation and combat, for 
which we know no higher name than Peace. 

We learn the outer form, the science, the art, 
of music, and beyond all these is still an inner- 



THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 229 

most thought, a revelation to the few souls who 
wait and listen. Do you not recognize in the 
grand Eroica symphony that there is a point at 
which music grows beyond its place as Art, and 
reveals itself as passion and life? — as the quiver- 
ing, eager, passionate aspiration after great deeds 
and thoughts,— as the invisible and palpable life 
that stirs in all heroic souls? As Beethoven 
himself said, "The spirit spake to me, and I 
wrote." 

You remember - the music which shudders and 
shivers along the nerves in the diabolical part of 
Mephistophelesin " Faust," — how it mocks, how 
it taunts at human pain, how it despairs of heaven ? 
At the very altar, as Margaret prays in anguish, 
comes the faint, flickering light in which the old 
days of innocence start up — "Recollect the days 
before," and the unearthly notes cause the half- 
uttered words of supplication to die away. This 
is the dark agony through which some souls are 
called to pass in their spiritual descent into 
Hades. A man has perhaps lived on the surface 
of life, content with outward forms, satisfied 
with bodily pleasures, never once lifting his eyes 
to the grand and silent heavens, which witness 
against so poor and narrow a life. Suddenly a 
sharp temptation overcomes him ; he slips and 
falls. Familiar faces turn away from him, 
familiar voices grow cold, and delight has gone 



23O IDEAL LIFE. 

from his days. In the bitter pain of his dark- 
ness and woe, his imaginary earth reels to its 
foundations beneath his uncertain feet, and the 
false heavens are darkened over him. For the 
first time he looks upon the face of his own 
spirit, and sees himself naked and blind and 
miserable. 

But then the theme changes. The angelic 
melody, at first low and trembling, begins to 
thrill along the keys in a sweet and quivering 
prelude, growing ever more distinct, more beau- 
tiful. Then he looks back upon the old self 
with pity and wonder, as on one lying asleep or 
dead. And he knows that only thus could his 
life-music have been evoked ; for not without 
sorrow, not without harsh dissonance, can the 
highest forms of melody ever be fully revealed 
to us. The sounds of pure and tender harmo- 
nies are most exquisitely felt against the tones 
of pain, like the perfect fairness of light shining 
through shadows. 

There is in music the delicate and subtle 
quality of sex,: — readily felt, but hard to define. 
There are songs which are purely womanly, 
symphonies which are manlike, heroic. Even 
musical instruments partake of one nature rather 
than the other. And the violin, above all 
others in its peculiar flexibility and tenderness, 
fills the place of a woman's voice in an orchestra. 



THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 23 1 

• 

It inspires more love than all other instruments, 
it has more pathos and individuality. A con- 
noisseur who possesses a genuine Stradivarices 
or Guanerius will not allow a profane hand to 
touch it, and only with reluctance will he allow 
it to be seen. It is not to the violinist so much 
as if he played at his own will, but as if there 
were a soul in the woody fibres which awoke at 
his touch, and breathed an answer to his 
thoughts. It is full of its own memories of 
winds and forests, delicious tones swell suddenly 
on the enchanted ear, melody seems to float 
from it as fragrance from an opening rose. 
Though its owner knows it well, it has no per- 
ceptible limitations ; there is ever in it an un- 
known. 

The woman's nature and the violin's are alike 
vibratory, and indeed all parts on stringed in- 
struments seem written to express the feminine 
soul. Listen to those long vibrations and lovely 
resonances of the quivering strings, — do they 
not interpret to you the delicate nature of 
womanhood! It is full of swaying moods and 
impulses and prone to changes which no reason 
can solve. At a breath their light goes out, 
and the spirit walks alone under grey skies, — or 
again in an instant the air is full of soft spring 
sunshine, in which flowers unfold their leaves. 
The moon of dreams full of glamour, shines 



232 IDEAL LIFE. 

oftenest in their spiritual atmosphere. They 
hear the sounds of wings, and know not whence 
they are. 

All songs written in a minor key with its 
pathetic suggestions and sorrowful cadences are 
feminine, and this fine element even character- 
izes certain times and measures. You hear it in 
the rhyme of the waltz. A friend of mine says 
that all waltzes are either fairy stories or roman- 
ces, and the changes of their strains are the 
alternating voices of the man and woman— the 
lover and beloved — who plead and softly reproach 
and reply to one another. Indeed, all dance- 
music has the element of romance, which is the 
intermingling of the life of man and woman. 
Only listen, and you will hear the story, or you 
will see it, for here again, as in the case of 
architecture, another art strikes deep under- 
ground roots into this, and all music has its 
picture. The waltz is like a summer night in 
the Southern States, with the winds blowing 
softly on dark and fragrant gardens, and the far- 
off noise of waves that beat and beat upon the 
shore. Through the half-opened windows bars 
of light stretch out into the dusk, and you catch 
glimpses of the man and woman as they move; 
or fragmentary phrases and little snatches of 
song float out to you. 

The Polonaise of Chopin recalls to you rather 
a scene at Court, where the tessellated marble 



THE* MUSIC OF LIFE. 233 

floors echo faintly with the tread of the stately 
dancers in the old court dresses of Poland. 
And when the strange electric Tarantella sounds, 
you see the white sands glitter and burn in the 
intense noon, and the little peasants dancing to 
the feverish and potent sorceries of its music. 

In strange contrast with these is another group 
of melodies with the tremulous monotone of the 
spinning-wheel running under them all. These 
are in gray, neutral tints, with faint lights like 
those in a November sky before the first fall of 
snow. A great many composers have delighted 
in the curiously recurring measure. We have 
Mendelssohn's Spinnlied, La Tilense; Liszt's love- 
ly arrangement of Wagner's spinning-wheel song 
in the Flying Dutchman ; Schubert's Gretchen 
am Spinnenrade, full of trembling passion and 
woe; the old Thuringian air of " There was a 
King in Thule " in Gounod's Faust, and the 
spinning-wheel quartette in the opera of Martha. 

There seems to be a peculiar charm about these 
airs with the slow monotonous whirr and click of 
their measure, and the murmuring undertone of 
regret. There is an old Scotch ballad which has 
this refrain, telling of a young girl's quiet life: 

" And aye I turned my spinning-wheel," 

As the wheel turned with the ceaseless hum and 
purr, a thousand vague fancies came and went 
21 



234 IDEAL LIFE. 

in the maiden's heart, in which love had awaken- 
ed. The yielding of her whole nature to this 
new emotion is told with quaint terseness and 
simplicity. 

" I turned no more my spinning-wheel." 

A certain melancholy ring is discernable in all 
music of this class. It is not the restless fitful 
despair which "Auld Robin Grey" expresses, 

" I gang like a ghaist, I care na to spin, 
I dare na think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin," 

It is rather the quiet, but hopeless repetition of 
a want that has become a part of our nature. 

There are many lives like these airs, especially 
the lives of women in provincial towns and rural 
districts. So busied with little unnoticed duties, 
so colorless of outward excitement and hope, so 
uneventful year after year, winter and summer, 
that you do not perceive until their silent pres- 
ence is gone, the full harmony of such a patient, 
self-denying, gentle existence. While they are 
here, their lives seem so level and still that you 
never suspect the swaying and ebbing of the in- 
visible tides within, or the blooming of pure 
, dreams which rough needs perhaps tread daily 
} underfoot. We see only ' ' the dull, set life, and 
apathetic days," but they weave themselves at 
last into sweet, sad dreamy music, full of rests 
and slow melody. 



THJ£ MUSIC OF LIFE. 235 

We would not be so surprised at suffering, 
says Ballanche, if we knew how much better 
sorrow was adapted to our nature than pleasure. 

But as you cannot thoroughly understand any 
class of musical compositions unless you under- 
stand what part of life it expresses, so neither 
can you comprehend the works of a great com- 
poser, without some knowledge of his life-history. 
Stradella's passionate love ; Chopins' long sus- 
pense and unsatisfied desire, the warm friend- 
ships, the bright and loving household life of 
Mendelssohn ; the simplicity and unworldliness 
of Haydn, are all told in their own language of 
harmony. There we hear the grand faith and 
sorrow of Beethoven, struggling with a world 
that understood him not, suffering from deser- 
tion and isolation, and the bitterness of the loss 
of all outer sound and melody, but still so truly 
the ' ' great master, " that even the ignorant peas- 
ants and charcoal burners would stand aside, 
heavily burdened, from his path to let him pass 
undisturbed. Schumann's wild, sweet, fanciful 
music, reveals his bliss and his anguish, the 
brooding thought that merged itself in mad- 
ness ; and the music of Handel is worship. 

The later part of Handel's life was darkened 
by the shadow of blindness, an acute grief to a 
nature of such sensibility and tenderness. It is 
said that he often wept as he wrote, and that he 



236 IDEAL LIFE. 

composed the accompaniment to " He was de- 
spised," with uncontrollable sobs and tears. An- 
gelic harmonies came to him as a sound and a 
vision; he says of the Hallelujah Chorus " I 
thought I saw all heaven before me, and the 
great God himself," and its grand rhymes echo 
still with the exultation and the rapture. 

Music breathes with all the pangs and ecsta- 
sies of such souls, it tells of their faith and their 
desires ; it speaks unto souls again ; it reconciles 
us to the falling short of life ; it spreads our days 
before us as an open scroll. It may be more 
truly said of this than all other arts that man 
" has gazed long and wistfully at the heavens ; he 
hears in this the murmur of the wings which 
can bear him thither." 



POETRY. 237 



CHAPTER VII I. 

POETRY. 

THE HEBRAIC PASTORAL THE GREEK EPIC — THE 

GERMAN DRAMA. 

>!pOETRY is no less a passion than an art, and 
\J its quick tides of life flow through every 
vein of the artistic creation. Thackeray says 
of the figure of St. Michael on the castle of St. 
Angelo, that it is a great sonnet, " set, rhymic, 
grandiose. Milton wrote in bronze ; Virgil pol- 
ished off his Georgics in marble — sweet, calm 
shapes ! exquisite harmonies in line ! As for 
the JEneid, that I consider to be so many bas- 
reliefs, mural ornaments, which affect me not 
much." Poetry is so fecund with all the germs 
of beauty that, like the fabled towers of the old 
city, the statue rises into form, and the picture 
flashes into color, at the sound of its sweet sing- 
ing. But as we might divine from its infinite 



238 IDEAL LIFE. 

scope, its own loveliness lies chiefly on the spiri- 
tual side ; in all ages have the visions of the poet 
stretched far on, like sweet sounds cleaving the 
silence, into spiritual worlds, and summoned 
before us the august presences of the dead. 
Pindar and Virgil and Dante wander into a land 
whereon the earthly sun shines no more ; and 
every true singer shows to us all things as allied 
" by issue and by symbol " to the spiritual life 
beyond our ken. 

Poetry draws its life-blood from the passions 
and desires, the pangs and raptures of humanity, 
and, therefore, the highest poets are always 
found closely united with the life of the great 
central cities of the world. They kindle with 
this strange luminous atmosphere of thought 
and influence, which encompasses them like the 
heat and light thrown out from a large city in 
the darkness of the night. What is Dante, or 
his kingdoms of the dead, without his Florence? 
The grief of exile withered all his days like a 
fresh branch cut off from its vital root. 

" The tall green poplars grew no longer straight, 
Whose tops not looked to Troy." 

The power of a great city is a wonderful thing ; 
all vital movements originate here, and flow out 
more slowly into the rural provinces, retarded 
there by lingering superstitions and worn-out 



* POETRY, 239 

faiths. In Germany, while the imperial free 
towns of the fifteenth century were beginning to 
stir with the reaction against Rome which Luther 
embodied, and the arts and sciences in the Ital- 
ian cities had reached their most fruitful epoch, 
the country districts were still observing the old 
Teutonic rites, the remnants of son-worship and 
fire-worship, in the flames that blazed on every 
mountain height at midsummer, and the passing 
of animals through the smoking weedfire. 
Rome and Florence were the centres of the Re- 
naissance ; Paris the heart of the Republics 
which quickened Nantes, Marseilles, Bordeaux, 
and Lyons. For fifteen centuries Jerusalem was 
the City of the Vision of Peace, which lay deep- 
est in the soul of all christian civilization, and 
made the West strong against the East. Henry 
the Fourth, of England, died ' ' desiring to go 
unto Jerusalem ;" and her walls and towers were 
sacred for a hundred alien and hostile races. 
Wherever the thoughts of humanity strike root, 
man also builds, and forms a group, a congeries, 
a society, which makes them enduring powers 
that grow and ripen through ages. 

The scene of one of the earliest and tenderest 
pastorals — the Hebraic story of Ruth — is laid at 
the village of Bethlehem, near Jerusalem. This 
village, afterwards the birthplace of the Shep- 
herd-King and poet, is built on a hill, surrounded 



24O IDEAL LIFE. 

by the dark green fig and gray olive trees, and 
overlooks a long, narrow valley, through which 
doubtless the two wanderers came wearily from 
the land of Moab. It was " in the beginning 
of barley harvest, " and you see in the whole 
narrative the most primitive form of village life, 
blended still with the simple and picturesque de- 
tails of pastoral occupations. The drawing of 
the water, the threshing floor, the gleaning, the 
reapers, the kindly and eager interest of the 
people — " all the city was moved" about the 
return — the ceremony with the kinsman at the 
gate, all speak of an early age. The excessive 
simplicity of the story marks it strongly ; the 
theme is denuded, and the characters are not of 
heroic type, nor have they, with one exception, 
either the freshness or joy of youth. The 
eagerness and grace of love as a passion is not 
here ; it is only a friendship between woman and 
woman, but so tender, so true, so earnest, that 
Ruth's '■' Entreat me not to leave thee " touches 
still our inmost soul, for there is no greater sin 
than unfaithfulness. 

The Greek life was at one with its cities 
and the epochs of its history are marked by the 
fall of the cities of its enemies. When Tyre 
fell, the East lay open to them ; at the fall of 
Alexandria, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, 
the three great races of old civilization, met to- 



POETRV. 24I 

gether ; while with the fall of Troy, the Greek 
world began, evolved by a common cause out 
of a multitude of petty kings and chiefs, with 
their armed followers. The tale of Troy is the 
one unapproachable epic of all ages, and its 
characters still move us with their wonderful 
force and fire. The gathering of the troops, 
the sailing of the ships, is at Aulis. The Achaian 
chiefs, of noble form and stature, are men of 
fierce characters, but capable of generous and 
unselfish deeds and strong friendships. First is 
Achilles, beautiful and glorious, whose prowess 
is described in colossal outlines, at whose ap- 
proach an army trembles, and whom at last 
Apollo himself slays, he having chosen a brave 
death before Troy rather than a long and inglo- 
rious life in Phthia, With him comes Patroclus, 
his friend ; Ajax, noblest in form after Achilles, 
and his brother Teucer, the venerable Nestor 
with his two sons, the two friends, Diomedes 
and Sthenelus ; the crafty and eloquent Ulysses; 
Agememnon the leader, and a long line of allies 
and companions in arms. 

Ten years is Troy besieged, for it is rather a 
walled fortress for defense than a great city. It 
is sacred Troy, the handiwork of primitive build- 
ers,* placed upon a height whence the hamlets 
around which furnish soldiers at its call, lie in 

*See Gladstone's articles on Homer. 
22 



242 IDEAL LIFE. 

full view. Its beetling site and " wind-swept " 
towers, are plainly seen by the allies as they 
journey towards it from Thrace, Mysia, Lycia 
and Phrygia, and the thousand watch-fires blaz- 
ing on the Trojan heights, shine upon the Ama- 
zons and upon Memnon the beautiful sun of the 
Dawn, as they wend their way hither. The life 
of Troy is like that of the German Freiherren, 
or free Barons of the fifteenth century ; but with 
the addition of Asiatic traits, for the spacious 
palace of Priam — necessarily spacious — contains 
his fifty sons and their families, and his wives 
and daughters unmentioned save Hecuba and 
Cassandra, who, with wild eyes and dilated nos- 
trils presages woe to the unlistening city. Across 
this barbarous and sensual life, the tender idyls 
of Denone, and of Hector, and Andromache, 
true married lovers, come like the soft breathing 
of a flute across the clangor of trumpets. 

Around the marvelous old beleaguered city 
the k>ng siege ebbed and flowed with all the 
changes of war, and there was dissension on its 
behalf in the council halls of the Gods. Zeus 
and Appollo fight for the besieged but fitfully ; 
while Juno or Here, jealous and strong-willed, 
' ' on whose inner heart is written in deep char- 
acters the Achaian name," works with untiring 
energy and unfailing sympathy, and wins the 
conflict. Troy is no more ! 



POETRY. 243 

The Homeric poets feel strongly the life of a 
great city, of men working together, and this 
influence tingles through every line and phrase. 

They were probably Achaians, who do not 
seem to have felt the same pleasure in nature 
which marked the Ionians and other Greeks. 
The sea lay before them and the sky above, but 
the tumultous beating of the waves, and drifting 
clouds, were disregarded for the human beings 
on the plain below the city, who fought, suffered, 
rejoiced — and alas ! died beneath some sudden 
and sharp stroke of the foeman ! They cared 
for humanity ; not for nature, or the Gods over- 
much in comparison with Hector and Achilles, 
for the stature of their heroes, dwarfs, even their 
deities. 

The village of Bethlehem, the fortress of Troy, 
were rather different periods of the city's growth 
than the city itself. That we might have seen 
in the mediaeval towns of Germany, with high 
walls, through whose loopholes the river gleams 
and steeple-like gate towers, guarding the heavy 
bridge, and domes and spires rising into the sky, 
from which come the reverberations of deep-toned 
bells. Outside on the dark mountains lie the 
fabled Walpureis-Nacht world, with gnomes and 
witches, and unhallowed things, but here is the 
broad noon of every-day thought. The streets 
are crowded with peasants, soldiers, students, 



244 IDEAL LIFE. 

lovers singing before the windows of their chosen 
maidens, men drinking and carousing in taverns, 
and from the open cathedral doors break across 
the din the awful notes of the " Dies Irae," 

" Quaerens me sedisti lassus; 
Redemisti crucem passus ; 
Tantus labor non sit cassus." 

In such a town Goethe lived, and he places 
here the scene of his mighty drama " Faust," 
which vibrates with the spell of these familiar 
and closely blended lives, that form the warp 
and woof of the web the Pargcs weave. Like 
** Job," like " Hamlet," it deals with humanity 
rather than man, and like them also is pro- 
foundly sad. Faust perpetually broods over the 
problem of life, its inner freedom and " encom- 
passing necessity," which no philosophy can 
touch, a problem full of antagonisms and desires, 
of unfulfillment and satiety ; and by his side 
walks Mephistopheles, the false spirit of doubt, 
jeering and deriding all. The simple and touch- 
ing character of Margaret is seldom brought into 
contact with him, for in her we see the force of 
love, which has no affinity with doubt, but 
works out its deliverance with agony, and is 
brought at last into light and peace. 

Our life returns ever upon itself as it grows, 
and our first states of innocence nourish all the 



POETRY. 245 

nobility we afterwards achieve. All poetic fire 
and loveliness of line, color and melody, all 
national attainments and governments, are only 
good as they minister to the growth of character, 
and it is individual character in which they find 
their mainspring, — in household life and service. 
We gather our fairest and most complete inter- 
pretations of the ideal life from the lives of those 
we love, and the memories of our dead ; and 
these, forever mingling their sweet waters and 
dark waves, are the fountains from which all 
human thoughts and deeds flow. 



THE END. 



